Facebook blackout silences social network – for 20mins

Facebook went offline this morning, leaving users unable to access the site.

For about 20 minutes after 9am UK time the social media's website delivered an error message telling users that their accounts were "temporarily unavailable".

Facebook users unable to get by without social media contact sought refuge on Twitter, which was flooded with updates from people saying they could not access the site. The outage appears to have affected the company's website and apps.

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The Facebook developers site also "recorded a spike in response time", ITV News reports.

According to TechCrunch it is not uncommon for "young services" to experience extensive outages. "Twitter, for one, when small, was down chronically," the website said in an article reporting a brief Facebook blackout in May. But Facebook can no longer be considered small "given how mature it is as a platform" so the outage "is a larger issue".

In the immediate aftermath, many Twitter users saw the funny side of the outage:

In the past Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive, was quoted as saying that the site would never crash, The Guardian notes.