110 days

Rosa Golijan

Users experience brief Facebook outage

Many Facebook users appear to have experienced a brief outage or have encountered particularly slow-loading pages, both of which are extremely rare for the social network.

A quick check of DownForEveryoneOrJustMe, a website which can be used to check the availability of other sites, showed that there were definitely widespread issues with Facebook during a 15 or 20 minute time period on Thursday. From past experience, I realize that DownForEveryoneOrJustMe isn't always perfectly accurate when it comes to large sites which rely on clusters of servers — but it can still be used to confirm that some people did have issues.

Several of our staff members — including yours truly — struggled to load any Facebook pages, and Twitter is full of posts reporting similar issues.

We have reached out to Facebook in an attempt to figure out what happened and were told that "some users briefly experienced issues loading the site," by a Facebook spokesperson. She added that "the issues have now been resolved, and [Facebook is] back to 100%."

Great, now we can get back to the hilarious Twitter responses to the brief Facebook outage:

Related stories:

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• Teens broke into CNN newsroom to check Facebook?
• Facebook offers plenty of reasons not to like its shares

Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.