Why does Facebook keep crashing?

Facebook suffered another outage last night – its third in 11 days.

The social networking website, which is used by nearly 1.5 billion people worldwide, was out of action for about an hour at 7pm BST, prompting hysteria and humour among its users.

An engineer at the company said the latest problem centred around Facebook's Graph API – the core of the service's system that connects posts, photos and statuses for people, groups and pages. The graph failed, taking the website down with it.

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The outages have had a financial impact on the company. Facebook's shares were down nearly four per cent at $89.25 (£58.83) shortly after the site went offline last night.

It has been a tough month for the social networking site: it also suffered outages on 17 and 24 September. This is an unprecedented succession of crashes and has led analysts to call into question its reliability.

On Thursday 24 September, Facebook was out of action for around 12 minutes. The homepage was inaccessible with a brief error message of "Sorry, something went wrong". This was followed by a new message that read: "We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

The other outage took place exactly a week before and lasted about five minutes. The company refused to give a detailed explanation of the cause.

"This is getting ridiculous," commented Venture Beat on the trio of fails. "Much like Google, Facebook is seen as a site that never goes down. The three outages in September 2015, however, are seriously putting its reliability into question."

Last night, a Facebook spokesperson said: "We're currently restoring Facebook services that people had trouble accessing earlier today due to a configuration issue. We're working to bring things back to normal for everyone. We apologise to those who have been inconvenienced."

It was left to the BBC's North America technology correspondent to put things in perspective. "All right, all right – the world is still spinning," he reassured the panicking planet.