Facebook Goes Down For 20 Minutes … Thank God For Twitter

Facebook went down this afternoon. What was our first clue?

Twitter:

Tweets about “FacebookDown”

Unlike some recent limited Facebook outages, this seemed widespread with both desktop and mobile users reporting that they couldn’t access the network.

We’ll keep refreshing and update when Facebook returns to action. Meanwhile, here’s our favorite related snark tweet:

Facebook’s not down, it’s just busy taking the Ice Bucket Challenge.

— Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) September 3, 2014

Postscript: Facebook is back online. The outage began at 3:41 p.m. Eastern, according to Downdector.com (which is also about the time we noticed it). The site and mobile appeared to started coming back online about 20 minutes later.

Postscript II: A Facebook spokesperson emailed this statement:

“Earlier today we encountered an error while making an infrastructure configuration change that briefly made it difficult for people to access Facebook. We immediately discovered the issue and fixed it, and everyone should now be able to connect. We apologize for the inconvenience and will thoroughly investigate this issue so we can learn from it and ensure that Facebook is there when people need it.”