Brief Facebook outage prompts flurry on Twitter
Facebook users experienced a brief outage of the huge social network Thursday, with many turning to Twitter to vent frustration or joke about the incident.
The monitoring website Currentlydown showed Facebook offline for around 14 minutes from around 1630 GMT. The news website TechRadar pegged the outage at 22 minutes, and others gave varying estimates.
Facebook had no immediate comment on the outage.
As with previous such incidents, this one sparked a series of panicked—and mock-panicked—remarks on rival network Twitter. The #facebookdown theme became a global trending item on the messaging platform.
"Facebook was down, people took to the streets waving pictures in people's faces screaming "DO YOU LIKE THIS????, TELL ME YOU LIKE THIS!!!!," one Twitter user wrote.
Another wrote "#facebookdown means we can't get updates from those groups we never asked to join, or see pics of what distant cousins had for lunch."
Facebook, which has some 1.49 billion active users, according to the latest company update, experienced a major outage in January lasting around one hour. The company said a software update was to blame, dismissing concerns of a cyberattack.
© 2015 AFP
