Facebook, Messenger Back Online After Outage in Some Parts of the World

People thronged Twitter after social media giant Facebook on Tuesday faced an outage in Asia, Australia, New Zealand and some parts of North America. Facebook users got an error message: "Sorry, something went wrong and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

Later, a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement: "Earlier today, some Facebook users were unable to access Facebook briefly due to a technical issue. We have now fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience caused."

According to DownDetector.com, the outage, which also appears to be affecting Facebook's mobile app and Messenger, also spread to parts of North America.

Many social media users took to Twitter to talk about the rare Facebook outage.

WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook, also suffered a widespread global outage last week that lasted for several hours before being resolved, the company said.

WhatsApp was down in parts of India, Canada, the United States and Brazil. It affected people who use the service on Apple's iOS operating system, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows mobile OS.

In Brazil, where the professional class relies heavily on the messaging service, WhatsApp was down for about two and a half hours. Many users switched to rival system Telegram, which has picked up millions of customers in Brazil after two previous WhatsApp outages resulting from court orders.

WhatsApp's is used by more than 1.2 billion people around the world and is a key tool for communications and commerce in many countries. The service was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion.

Written with agency inputs