Facebook had a temporary outage that affected all traffic from the internet and apps to the social network. The popular social network was down for somewhere between ten minutes and about half an hour or so (depending upon which news resource you read and which country it was located in). At the time I am writing this blog, Facebook has returned to its usual service.
The Guardian reported that this was the longest outage that Facebook has had in four years. It also shared that there was a noticeable drop in the amount of Facebook referrals to The Guardian while Facebook was out of service.
About 1.28 billion users were suddenly unable to access Facebook while it was having the outage. TechCrunch reports that Facebook was unavailable in multiple regions around the world. This included the UK, France, Belgium, and parts of Asia (including India).
Personally, I noticed that my friends who live in Australia were posting Tweets in which they wondered why Facebook was down. It was rather amusing to see people from all over the world turn to Twitter to complain (and make jokes) about Facebook’s outage.
TechCrunch also reported that the outage affected not only the Facebook website and its smartphone and tablet apps but also some Facebook plug-ins that were attached to other websites. Those of you who use Facebook and have connected it to other websites may want to check and see how you were affected by the outage. Or, you may want to check your stats to see how Facebook’s outage affected traffic to your website.
What happened that caused Facebook to have an outage? That hasn’t been revealed. Several websites (including The Guardian) posted a statement that came from Facebook. It said:
Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.