Facebook crashes, no injuries.
Source: stuff.co.nz
Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, appeared to temporarily crash globally this afternoon.
The anarchist digital group calling themselves Anonymous claimed credit for it.
Facebook itself HAS yet to say anything about it.
Users said they were unable to login to Facebook, or “a website that uses Facebook Connect” for a short period of time this afternoon.
“I get an error message that says, “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can,”” Another person tweeted.
Facebook’s photo-sharing service, Instagram, did not appear to be affected by the outage.
As the site resumed function, users posted complaints on the Facebook Engineering page.
One user said they were “getting error messages for everything now,” and others commented, “it’s down!”.
“Hmm, possible shredding of documents as part of FB cover up to NSA, yeah sounds good, call it an outage!” Another user added.
Ironically, downrightnowcom – a website that monitored user reports and website outages – had also crashed.
The last major Facebook outage was September 24 2010 when the site was out of action for over two and a half hours.
On rival social media Twitter the crash caused hectic multi-lingual angst with many of the complaints coming from Brazil.
One Twitter user from Portugal said “TANGO DOWN by ANONYMOUS LEADER Blame #todopoderoso it for global warming and everything else.”
None of it was explained.
Others on Twitter were lighthearted: “Where were you during the Great Facebook Crash of 2013?” and “productivity rates just sky rocketed after that facebook crash”.
Allen Renfro of the US reported on Twitter: “The Facebook crash is big news. It even made Twitter.”
Others were grumpy.
“Difference between Facebook & everybody else. We don’t crash ever! If the servers are down, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed.”
Another wondered if they were responsible: “I used “#facebook” in a status update on Facebook, & now seem to have caused the entire site to crash for the last 5 minutes. #MyBad #Sorry”.
Mega founder and internet millionaire Kim Dotcom even jokingly tweeted that the crash was linked to the American NSA’s PRISM programme.
“#NSA is upgrading #Prism capacity on Facebook today. Expect service interruptions on Facebook for the next few hours :-)”
– © Fairfax NZ News
