If you decided to check Facebook early this morning, the message greeting you was not a nightmare, it was real. The social networking site, which prides itself on never crashing, suffered a brief outage around 4 a.m. in New York.
“Sorry, something went wrong,” read Facebook’s homepage. “We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”
In a statement, a Facebook spokesman said the site had “run into an issue while updating the configuration of one of our software systems. Not long after we made the change, some people started to have trouble accessing Facebook.” Facebook apologized for the inconvenience.
Service was restored within 30 minutes, but the world reacted the only way it could: On Twitter. Within minutes, 龜bookdown was trending, along with #WhenFacebookWasDown. According to data provided by Topsy, there were over 60,000 tweets with the phrase 龜bookdown during the outage.
“Facebook was down for a bit, productivity levels around the world went up for a brief moment there!” tweeted one user. “Where were you when Facebook went down for 10 minutes? #TellYourChildren 龜bookdown” tweeted another.
The outage stretched across the globe, but given the hour, users in Europe, Asia and the Middle East were the most affected. According to Facebook, there are more than 1.2 billion users across the world of the social-networking site.
