Worker productivity must have seen a major spike on Wednesday when Facebook suffered a 20-minute outage that affected desktop and mobile users in North America, Europe, and Asia.
At around 3:40 P.M. Eastern Time, Facebook went completely dark, preventing users from logging in and gaining access to their news feeds. Downtime tracking websites DownForEveryoneOrJustMe and IsSiteDownRightNow also reported the outage, with the latter also displaying a map that showed which parts of the world are also experiencing Facebook downtime. The map from IsSiteDownRightNow shows users from the U.S., Canada, Brazil, the U.K., Portugal, Germany, the Philippines, India and several other parts of Europe and Asia were also unable to access their Facebook accounts.
Facebook has already confirmed the issue, citing errors during "infrastructure configuration change" that caused the problem. The social network experienced downtime for roughly 20 minutes but is now working properly, so users can now log in and go back to sharing the most mundane parts of their lives again.
"We immediately discovered the issue and fixed it, and everyone should now be able to connect," says Facebook in a statement. "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."
Last month, Facebook also suffered another service disruption for around 45 minutes. Facebook released a statement acknowledging the outage but did not provide further details as to what caused the problem. May and June also saw two more blackouts, with Facebook pointing to issues with its "serving infrastructure" as the root of the issue.
Based on Facebook's $2.91 billion earnings for this year's second quarter, the social network earns approximately $22,453 every minute. That means, for every 20 minutes of outage, Facebook suffers a loss of approximately half a million dollars.
Other major websites also took a hit in the last few days. eBay users complained of not being able to log in to their online shopping accounts due to "technical issues" that occurred during one of eBay's scheduled server maintenance sessions. On Tuesday, Apple also suffered a six-hour downtime when some users "may have been unable to access multiple stores or make purchases" on the iTunes and App Stores.
Tumblr, a Yahoo-owned blog service provider, was also down for 20 minutes on Wednesday reportedly due to an Internet connection interruption in Tumblr's primary data center during scheduled maintenance. LinkedIn also reported that it is "currently experiencing some issues" but did not provide details as to what these issues were.
