Facebook Inc.’s website returned to service after disruptions that blocked access to the world’s largest social-networking site for about half an hour.
“Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented some users from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time,” Menlo Park, California-based Facebook said in an e- mailed statement that didn’t explain what caused the disruption.
The failure drove thousands instantly to complain about the loss of Facebook access on other services such as Twitter Inc. The hashtag #facebookdown on Twitter’s microblogging site was used more than 71,000 times in the past day, according to Apple Inc.’s Topsy Labs, a social-media tracker. Facebook, with more than 1 billion users across the planet, has been working on hardware and software changes to help it reduce server downtime and deal with greater traffic loads.
Early today, visitors to Facebook saw an error message that said: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.” Among cities where access was compromised were Tokyo, Taipei, New Delhi, Moscow, Johannesburg, Paris, Amsterdam and London as of 9:03 a.m. London time.
Facebook’s mobile application also appeared affected, with status updates and messages not loading during the disruption. The website was back online by about 9:30 a.m. London time.
The site also experienced a failure in April, and in 2010, its servers went down for 2.5 hours because an automated program meant to fix certain code values overwhelmed a database with traffic.
No Crashes
The site had 1.28 billion monthly active users and 1.01 billion monthly mobile active users in March, making it one of the world’s most-accessed Internet services.
Facebook said in April that first-quarter revenue rose 72 percent to $2.5 billion, beating analysts’ estimates, on soaring mobile-advertising revenue.
Shares of the company declined 1 percent to $64.92 at 11:47 a.m. in New York. They have gained 19 percent this year. Facebook sold shares in an initial public offering at $38 apiece in May 2012.
Facebook’s dependency on working servers was alluded to in the 2010 movie “The Social Network.”
“Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don’t crash ever,” said the character portraying co-founder Mark Zuckerberg -- played by Jesse Eisenberg -- according to the website imdb.com. “If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle.”
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