Facebook Says 'Sorry' for Thursday's 'Brief' Outage

For about a half hour starting at around 8:00am GMT (1:30pm IST), users were greeted with the message, "Sorry, something went wrong," when they tried to access their accounts.

Thousands headed to Twitter to make sure they were not alone in their Facebook-free plight, many posting under the hashtag #Facebookdown.

Online wags were quick to mock those who were panicking.

Others wondered aloud how the world would keep turning if people were unable to post updates of their airport transit lounge, what they were eating for breakfast or amusing photos of their pets.

Most users in the Americas slept through the outage, which the cloud-computing firm Cedexis said lasted from 07:56 GMT until 08:36 GMT in France.

Access and traffic were also impacted in many other countries including in Russia, Spain and England.

"Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time," Facebook said in a statement apologising for the incident. "We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent."

Facebook is the world's most popular social network and sees more than 1.2 billion active users each month.

Though much of its traffic is driven by light-hearted posts between friends, it has become a vital tool for countless businesses and organisations and a key forum for communication in countries with repressive media.