Facebook outage smashes record as deprived users struggle to cope

The Facebook outage that has sent deprived social media users into an utter frenzy, with some people still shut out 12 hours on, has gone down as the platform’s longest outage in its 15-year history.

The social media nightmare, which started at 2am (AEST), has now reached the point where anxious users are quite literally calling the police with their concerns.

In what was a strangely enjoyable moment for many, Facebook ironically took to Twitter to announce that they were aware of the “partial outage”.

While they couldn’t say what caused the problem that seems to be also impacting Instagram and WhatsApp, they insisted that it was not due to a “distributed denial of service” or DDoS attack, a type of attack that hackers use to interrupt service to a site.

BBC Silicon Valley correspondent Dave Lee said the length and severity of the outage is unprecedented.

“The length of time, plus number of users affected, makes this comfortably the most severe outage in Facebook’s history,” he said on Twitter.”

“Last period of down time longer than this was in 2008, when Facebook had a mere 50m users.”

As expected, dedicated Facebook users who were struggling to get their meme fix, started freaking out at a level on par with the outage itself.

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