Facebook Suffers Outage In Parts Of Europe And Asia

A sizeable proportion of Facebook’s 850 million users were unable to access the social network on Wednesday morning, Reuters reports.

At approximately 6.45am GMT an outage was reported by users trying to access the site via their computers in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Trans-continental down time

“Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of users in Europe,” Facebook said in a statement. “The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologise for any inconvenience.”

Countries reportedly affected included the UK, Germany, the UAE, Pakistan, Spain, Russia, Ireland, Turkey, Egypt, Nepal and France among others.

The downtime persisted for roughly two hours though some users reported on Twitter that they were able to access Facebook using mobile devices. Disgruntled users used the micro-blogging platform to complain about the problem while others merely jested in a pattern that has become commonplace when the social network unexpectedly stops working.

Due to a lack of clarification from Facebook itself, Twitter was also the source of speculation over why the outage occurred. Some suspected a DNS issue while a more unlikely theory was that Anonymous had attacked Facebook in misplaced anger over yesterday’s capture of key members of LulzSec by the FBI.

Facebook filed for a $5 billion (£3.2bn) initial public offering in February and will hope that such lapses in functionality do not occur again as potential investors closely scrutinise the company’s performance.

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