Facebook Goes Down For 30 Minutes Worldwide, Reasons Still Unknown

This morning, Facebook, the largest social network in the world crashed for about thirty minutes, for reasons it hasn’t yet revealed.

Users across the world were greeted by an infamous blue rectangle of an error message, as Facebook suffered its longest downtime in four years. Some instantly took to Twitter and other alternative social networks to express their concerns, with the outage instantly becoming a trending topic worldwide.

What went wrong?

The outage started around 9:00am BST and affected both mobile and desktop users.

All account holders who tried to access Facebook in the next 30 minutes were faced with a message that informed them that “something went wrong”, but did not elaborate on the details.

The downtime triggered some very creative responses that mocked our dependence on Facebook and other social networks.

The website came back online at 9:24am BST. “We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent,” a spokesman for the social network told Reuters. “We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Experts have noticed the impact the outage had on the amount of traffic routed to a wide variety of websites. For example, referrals from Facebook to the Guardian dipped dramatically, but there was an immediate surge in traffic originating from Twitter.

Facebook’s previous serious outage happened in 2010, when the website was unavailable for 2.5 hours. It was caused by a cyclical server error that eventually overwhelmed its databases.

It is currently unclear what caused the downtime, but experts agree that it must have been a core systems failure, since it affected users worldwide.

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