Facebook goes down; people panic and resort to Twitter

In a rather bizarre news, Facebook servers seemed to have had a crash of some sorts, as the website was down for a few minutes this morning.

However, there is nothing to freak out folks, as the glitch has been resolved.

Users logging in to the social network, were taken aback when they were faced with an error message instead of the plethora of posts and invitations on their walls.

The site was down for about five minutes for some users, up to 10 minutes for others.

However it was resolved quickly and it was back providing respite to avid facebooker.

Facebook has apologized after its website went down, attributing the outage to an internal issue.

"Earlier today, an internal issue in our web infrastructure caused the site to be slow or unavailable for a brief period of time," a Facebook spokesman told AAP.

"We resolved the issue quickly, and should now be back to 100 per cent. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Messages posted online, apparently linked to hacking group Anonymous, have claimed responsibility for attacking the site, but this has not been verified.

If the outage was orchestrated by Anonymous, it's possible it was an attack over Facebook's involvement in the US National Security Administration data-mining scandal.

The social network revealed last week it had received between 9000 and 10,000 user-data requests from US government entities.

BuzzFeed recently put together a summary of the Internet in 60 seconds, estimating that more than 208,000 photos were uploaded to Facebook and more than 1,875,000 posts were liked.

By that we infer that in the 5-10 minutes that passed without facebook, 1,041,500 photos have gone un-uploaded, and 9,375,000 posts went un-liked.
Sounds horrific, doesn't it?

Desperate Facebookers turned to Twitter to find out if the outage was affecting anyone else; with tweets ranging from the dramatic: "the end is near, Facebook is down." to the rather blunt: "While Facebook is down, all you're missing is that a friend you haven't seen since 3rd grade posted a new photo of her kids."

Seems like all we need nowadays is to let all our thoughts flow directly from our brains to the welcoming walls of facebook and twitter. Presumably the "world" is indeed coming to an end giving birth to another "virtual world".

Oh! I just got a notification.