Facebook's Outage Thought to Be Its Longest Ever

In a major embarrassment for Facebook, users had to turn to Twitter for updates after what's thought to be the biggest outage in the site's history. "We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible," the company tweeted after an outage affected users around the world starting Wednesday afternoon. The outage, which also affected Instagram and WhatsApp, was the biggest disruption the site had faced since 2008, when it had 150 million users, compared to more than 2 billion today, the BBC reports.

After 14 hours, the outage appeared to have largely subsided by early Thursday, when Facebook posted an "It's good to be back" message, though not before many users took to Twitter to complain under hashtags like #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown, CNN reports. "The few Facebook users that migrated to twitter were among the lucky few to once again connect," joked one user. Others complained that the outage made it impossible to do their "Facebook-centric" jobs. Facebook has yet to comment on the cause. (More Facebook stories.)