Facebook experiences worldwide outage, #facebookdown trends on Twitter

Facebook.com

Facebook suffered a worldwide outage Thursday morning.

Users logging onto the wildly popular social media site could only receive error messages and were denied access to their accounts.

It is believed to have started at around 4 a.m. EST and lasted for at least half an hour. All aspects of the service were affected.

Those trying to access on desktop computers could only see a note saying: 'Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.'

And people attempting to log on via smartphone or tablet apps were simply told there was a 'network error.'

Business users also reported that the 'Like' button, that can be applied to external sites, was also out of use.

Despite fixing the issue, Facebook has so far not commented on what caused the incident.

Twitter reportedly experienced a huge spike in usage during the outage, however, with the hashtag #FacebookDown soon trending worldwide.

'Wow, seems that #Facebook is down. Oh well, at least we can still Tweet,' wrote one tweeter.

Following the site coming back online, many Tweeters started to poke fun at Mark Zuckerberg's California-based web firm.

'Okay, order has been restored, it seems. Cats. PDA. Grammar gaffes and undying love are no longer orphans FB is back! #facebookdown,' wrote one.

'I'm on the phone with Zucks. He revealed it was a viral promotion strategy to get Facebook trending on twitter #wellplayed #facebookdown,' added another.