When millions of users in some parts of the world lost access to Facebook.com Thursday, Sept. 24, users had to turn to other networks, particularly to Twitter, to vent. As expected, the Facebook outage ignited humorous jabs from Twitter users.
Instead of being greeted with the Facebook homepage, some users received an error message starting at approximately 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time.
"Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and will get it fixed as soon as we can," reads the error message.
The service reported that the Facebook Graph API became unavailable during the time. The Graph API is "[t]he primary way for apps to read and write to the Facebook social graph."
During the outage, Facebook Messenger and Facebook's mobile app seemed to be working fine.
The outage affected Facebook users in Europe, North America, Australia and India, based on the Facebook outage map on Downdetector.com.
In early August, we reported that some users in the U.S., particularly users from San Francisco, New York and other areas, could not access Facebook on their desktop or mobile. They also expressed their disappointment via Twitter, with some even going desperate.
Users in Los Angeles made a huge number of calls to the emergency service number 911 to ask about the restoration of the service. The incident prompted Sgt. Burton Brink, who was stationed in Crescenta Valley during that time, to tweet about the problem.
"Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don't call us about it being down, we don't know when FB will be back up," Brink said at the time.
Earlier this month, desktop and mobile users in North America, Europe and Asia already suffered a 20-minute outage.
The map from IsSiteDownRightNow also showed users from the Canada, U.S., Brazil, U.K., Germany, Portugal, the Philippines, India and many other parts of Asia and Europe experienced the service interruption.
"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."
During the most recent outage, tweets with the hashtag #FacebookDown swelled over Twitter.
FB users r roaming the streets nn tears, showing pictures of themselves in other people's faces yelling 'Do you like this'? #FacebookDown :p
— Amir Sohail (@ItsAmirSohail) September 24, 2015
BREAKING: Patriots being investigated for recent Facebook crash. #FacebookDown pic.twitter.com/ZP7QW4f2M1 — Faux NFL Network™ (@FauxNFLnetwork) September 24, 2015
praying for everyone with a birthday today, frantically hitting refresh. #facebookdown
— Andi McLellan (@AndiMcLellan) September 24, 2015
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror... #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/S9rGfLGfnH — Michael M. Hughes (@michaelmhughes) September 24, 2015
Don't worry Facebook techs I made a whimsical meme just for you #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/thbdKRVyLo
— Sophie Mason (@SophieMason3) September 24, 2015
