In the early hours of Thursday, June 19, Facebook experienced a short international outage, leaving millions of users with an error message. Facebook members from the U.K., Israel, China, Singapore, and India were most heavily impacted, according to a report by the Hollywood Reporter, but areas in Asia and the Middle East also expressed problems with the site.
The message simply read: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”
Most regions reported that the social networking site was functioning again only a half-hour later, but even so, users turned to Twitter to voice their opinions about the brief shutdown, creating a hashtag dubbed: #FacebookDown.
A representative for Facebook told USA Today: “Late last night, we ran 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. We quickly spotted and fixed the problem, and in less than 30 minutes.”
This malfunction was among Facebook’s lengthiest outages since 2010, when the site crashed for 2.5 hours.
“This doesn’t happen often,” the rep continued. “But when it does we make sure we learn from the experience so we can make Facebook that much more reliable. Nothing is more important to us than making sure Facebook is there when people need it, and we apologize to anyone who may have had trouble connecting last night.”
We will never forget #blackthursday #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/e7lwbw002c
— Staffan Nilsson (@StaffanNilsson) June 19, 2014
Guardian referral traffic took a bit of a dip when Facebook went down overnight https://t.co/xUVEtzCDlU pic.twitter.com/CNL4n2VUdJ
— erin mccann (@mccanner) June 19, 2014
Photo: Illustration/Courtesy Photo
