Following a recent Facebook crash, the website is now back online after the social network became unusable in many territories across the globe.

The global outage began on Tuesday morning and left large swathes of the US, Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia unable to access the site across all platforms.

It is still unclear as to what actually caused the crash to begin with.

Facebook Crash
Downdetector.com shows the affected areas

 

Down detector, a website that measures website outages, said that of the 254 complaints that they received on the Facebook crash 51% experienced a total blackout, 35% were unable to login, and 12% were unable to access pictures.

When users attempted to access the site they were met with the standard technical difficulties message saying: “Sorry, something went wrong.”

“We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

The social media giant has not yet commented on what went wrong, but the site is now fully operational across all territories.

The outage prompted many users to do what any of us would do in that situation and vent their frustrations on Twitter. The hashtag #FACEBOOKDOWN began trending within 10 minutes of the problems beginning.

Around this time Twitter also suffered a brief outage though not to the same extent as Facebook. It is unclear if the two incidents are related at this time.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook and other web services have been unavailable in 2015 the website was unavailable for 1.5 billion users worldwide following a ‘configuration issue’. During this time the site was completely offline for just 40 minutes but the company stock saw a fall of 4%. This shows that companies who connect people can suffer when they fail to do so.

Similarly, websites such as Twitter and Spotify were affected in 2016 when the Mirai botnet managed to utilise 100,000 systems running Linux to initiate the 2016 Dyn cyber attack. The attack caused the internet to become unavailable for large swathes of Europe and North America.