Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) had an outage just before 4:00 am Eastern Standard Time on Thursday morning. The downtime lasted close to thirty minutes. The outage affected both the website and application.
Facebook outage and error message
The error message on the site declared something was wrong and that the website was working on fixing the problem. At press time, there was no official word on what caused the outage. Not surprisingly, the outage generated many different comments and critiques all over social media rival Twitter. One user named Aaron Lucas joked that after over 20 minutes of global panic, Facebook’s outage has ended.
“This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologise for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned,” said Johnson who is a Director of Software Engineering at Facebook.
Another user named Andi Tutescu tweeted that Facebook’s outage has ended and everybody can get back to miserabilia. Overall, the outage caused thousands to complain about Facebook’s downtime on other social media platforms. The last time Facebook had a significant outage was last April. Prior to that, there was an outage in 2010 where the site’s servers went down for 2.5 hours.
The social media giant had a total of 1.28 billion active users and 1.01 billion active mobile users as of March, which is why it’s no wonder the social media reaction is so strong when the site is down. Social media analysis company Topsy claimed #Facebookdown hashtag was used on Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) a total of 49,000 times within an hour.
Last April, the search giant’s first quarter revenues rose 72% to $2.5 billion, which beat the estimates made by analysts. Facebook’s shares also rose 20% this year and added 1.9% to close yesterday at $65.60.
Facebook prides itself as the leader in social media, so the company understands how important it is to ensure servers are functioning at all times. Most internet users rely on Facebook for connections and most businesses rely on the site for promotional purposes. Fortunately for everyone, Facebook is now back up and running as usual.
