Facebook (News - Alert) users in Europe were in for surprise when their Facebook accounts became unavailable to them today. Most European users experienced this outage, which affected facebook.com as well as its apps for smartphones and tablets. However, the world's biggest social networking site didn’t shy away from admitting the problem and confirmed in a press statement, that the website indeed suffered from some technical issues, but also stated that the issue has been resolved.
"Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of users in Europe," Facebook said. "The issue has been resolved, and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience."
The inaccessibility to Facebook frustrated most European users and many decided to vent their frustrations on rival website Twitter. The micro-blogging site was flooded with news of the Facebook European outage, which is ironic, given that Twitter (News - Alert) itself is known to experience regular outages.
The reason for the European outage is still unclear and so is the scale and length of the outage. Many believe that the outage was a result of the Facebook servers that hold personal data going down. But this was not confirmed by the representative from Facebook’s London PR agency and Facebook refuses to give further details on the outage.
Facebook has over 845 million active users worldwide and made $3.7 billion in revenue last year from advertising alone.
Edited by Rich Steeves