Twitter celebrates fainting Facebook

A 35-minute outage on Friday prompted a flurry of complaints and comments on Twitter when the popular social networking site on Friday suffered its second brief outage in two months. Some users from Los Angeles also called 911 to register complain.

According to the website downdetector.com, the outage began around 1600 GMT, and appeared to last less than an hour. In that time, thousands of users complained they could not access the world’s biggest social network.

Similar to the June incident, Facebook users took to Twitter and posted sardonic comments, many using the hashtag #facebookdown. “Facebook is Down?! Oh God! Now How the Hell Am I Going to Find Out How My Friends Feel About Facebook Being Down?!” one user tweeted.

Another wrote “Facebook going down for 15 minutes is proof that today’s generation wouldve survived approximately 8 seconds in the 80s.”

According to LA County Sheriff sergeant Burton Brink, they received “several” calls from dissatisfied Facebook users seeking a solution to the error message they faced while logging into Facebook.

Frustrated, Brink wrote a message on Twitter: “Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please do not call us about it being down, we do not know when FB will be back up!”

Brink explained it was done to prevent more people from calling about the problem.

“We get phone calls all the time, whether it’s Facebook going down,” Brink added. “But with Facebook in particular, we get calls probably because it’s such a widely-used thing.”

However, Facebook responded to the 35-minute outage, saying, “Facebook is currently experiencing an issue that is affecting all API and web surfaces. Our engineers detected the issue quickly and are working to resolve it ASAP. We will update shortly.”

Facebook and Twitter are the world’s third-largest Internet market is a paradox. Facebook has 100 million users in India making it the second-largest market worldwide.

A survey by the Internet and Mobile Association of India found that 78 million netizens across the country were active users of Facebook in early 2013, registering a 50 per cent growth over the same period in 2012, followed by 33 million users on Twitter and 20 million users on LinkedIn.