Facebook Suffers Technical Difficulties in Europe, Asia

World’s No. 1 social networking site Facebook was unavailable for almost 2 hours in Europe and parts of Asia on Wednesday morning. Facebook referred to it as “technical difficulties” and was able to fix it quickly.

The nations that suffered the blackout include UK, France, Ireland, Spain, Germany and Sweden. The 2-hour technical blackout was also tolerated by some Asian countries including Pakistan, Nepal, Abu Dhabi and South Korea. The users reported that Facebook was accessible through cell phones, but the desktop version was down.

Users turned out to other social networking Web sites like Twitter and Pinterest while Facebook was inaccessible and #FacebookDown turned out to be the hottest topic on micro-blogging Web site Twitter.

Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of users in Europe. The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologise for any inconvenience, the California-based company said in a statement.

Facebook has 845 million active users. This temporary shutdown affected millions from them.

“know a number of people running one-man/small businesses who are very reliant on Facebook, using it as a tool to grow their operations/generate wealth. The people seeing this as a non-story (including, I suspect, many staunch defenders of entrepreunership/capitalism) need to realise just how important social media has become to the small business we're always told are the backbone of our economy.” said a user about Facebook shutdown.

Facebook Connect also faced technical difficulties, which left many Web site owners in annoyance.

Reliability is the most important aspect of any Web service. This blackout could force some users to change their paths from Facebook to other social networking sites.

“How will I let people know what I had for breakfast? Thank goodness for Twitter!” said another Facebook user.

(Reported by Johnny Wills, reported by Surojit Chatterjee)