Facebook suffered a rare outage yesterday (Thursday), rendering it unavailable for 30 minutes.
Millions of account holders were thought to have been affected by the half hour outage, which theguardian.com has claimed is the longest spell of downtime Facebook has experienced in four years. It’s also one in the eye for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who famously claimed his network would never crash or go down.
Both the app and website were unavailable, leading users to log into their other networks – such as Twitter – to vent their frustrations, seek answers or find out whether the issue affected people other than themselves. As such, hashtags including #FacebookDown began trending across the world.
Most of the reports came from Britain and central Europe, although other areas including the US, South America, Australia and east Asia also reported downtime, dailymail.co.uk reports.
Whilst this was said to be the longest unplanned outage in four years, it’s little compared with the four hour downtime Facebook saw in October 2013 when it underwent ‘network maintenance’.
In marketing terms, the outage is thought to have cost Facebook in the region of $500,000 in advertising revenue. Brands, meanwhile, would have noted a decline in site referrals as the social network dropped out – with them having to rely on alternative marketing techniques in the interim.
