Facebook suffered global outage for around half an hour on Friday, leaving millions of users unable to post status updates or browse their timelines. The outage started around 9.30pm India time.
Facebook acknowledged the issues with its service and said, “Facebook is currently experiencing an issue that is affecting all API and web surfaces. Our engineers detected the issue quickly and are working to resolve it ASAP. We’ll update shortly.”
The outage affected Facebook web page and its mobile apps. By 10.30pm Facebook was accessible again but it seemed slow and unreliable.
Instagram, which is now a Facebook-owned service, was also down.
Unfortunately for Facebook, Twitter was up and running when its servers were suffering glitch. Thousands of users flocked to the micro-blogging site to joke and rant at the expense of Facebook. Within minutes, #facebookdown was trending on Twitter.
Mostly, as it happens on Twitter, Facebook was target of jokes.
DepressedDarth, a parody account based on the Star Wars villain, tweeted, “Facebook is down, in related news, people now don’t know what people they barely knew in high school are doing.”
Another Twitter user, TheDelhiGuy, said, “#facebookdown couples saw each other for the first time in real world & they were shocked.”
The outage even drew attention of Twitter user TheTweetOfGod – obviously a parody account – who tweeted, “Attention world: #facebookdown. Please remain calm and do not attempt to interact with human beings.”
Third-party services like Tinder, which is dating app, that rely on Facebook data too suffered some issues with their services.
This led to some more jokes on Twitter. A user called RowdyGentleman tweeted, “A Rowdy Gentleman didn’t care that Facebook was down, until he realized that Tinder wasn’t working either.”
This is second time Facebook has suffered outage in the last two months. Earlier, the service saw its most severe outage in its history in June when it was completely inaccessible for over half an hour. On Friday, some users reported that they could log into the site even during outage but the service was very slow.
