ABU DHABI // Facebook users in the UAE were unable to access the social network after it crashed for about 20 minutes just after midday on Thursday.
In a rare global crash, members checking their newsfeeds were confronted with the message “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can”.
The Facebook mobile application was also down, with status updates and messages failing to load.
Some websites reported significant dips in traffic during the blackout because of the lack of referrals from Facebook.
“Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented some users from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time,” Facebook said after the problem was resolved at about 12.30pm.
Tokyo, Taipei, New Delhi, Moscow, Johannesburg, Paris, Amsterdam and London were among the cities affected.
Users in the UAE and UK took to other social-media platforms to report the Facebook problem.
The website rarely suffers any substantial downtime on a global scale.
In September 2010, it went down for about two and half hours for many users. Last October, server maintenance was blamed for preventing people from accessing the site, and in April this year some people also had problems.
In a post on the site after the 2010 problems, the following explanation was given: “An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.”
In the film The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, was famously portrayed as guaranteeing that the social network would never go down or crash. "Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else: we don't crash ever," said the character in the film, played by actor Jesse Eisenberg.
“If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed. Users are fickle.”
ksinclair@thenational.ae
* With additional reporting by Bloomberg
