Facebook goes down, affecting both website and apps

That's it for the liveblog, thanks for reading. For more information on the biggest Facebook outage in four years, read our article:

Facebook unavailable during longest outage in four years

“Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement sent to the Guardian.

The social network failed to explain what the issue was that caused the outage, but it is likely to have been something major to affect sites and apps globally. Facebook has servers dotted around the world to serve users in different countries and providing redundancy. A small, single server outage is unlikely to have caused the major issues seen today.

The last major outage to hit Facebook occurred in 2010 when the site was unreachable for 2.5 hours, the worst for four years.

The 2010 failure was due to a server error that caused Facebook's automated systems to corrupt services and cause more damage than it could fix, according to the social network.

Facebook explains that its automated systems normally detect and fix errors that could lead to outages, but an intentional change in some crucial files was erroneously detected as invalid by the automated systems.

The problem was exasperated by users, who in visiting the site and getting error messages caused the servers to create more logged errors overloading the site's system.

Did global productivity spike in the 20 minutes Facebook was down?

Seemingly Twitter would need to go offline too.

The outage was long enough that brands started to capitalise on it, poking fun at the social network.

As people decamped from Facebook there was an immediate surge in Twitter traffic to the Guardian, as users flocked to other means to complain about Facebook and continue sharing and talking about stories.

View image in fullscreen

Facebook's outage hit more than just the social network as users sharing stories on the site are one of the main drivers of website views across the internet.

As an example, the Guardian's traffic dipped as Facebook referral dramatically dropped as the site went down across the globe.

View image in fullscreen

Facebook is back up for some, as the service resumes and the social network rolls back into life. After around 20 minutes offline, its longest service disruption in living memory.

People have even taken to Google+ to complain about the outage.

"Facebook is down, I must be the only one which means this makes me less, not more productive. Ugh goddamnit facebook," said Mathew Hanley.

Some are taking to Twitter in panic, or at least mocked panic.

Others are more amused than shocked.

This is the first time Facebook has suffered a widespread outage which has lasted for more than a few minutes.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive was famously quoted as saying that the social network would never go down, it would never crash.

Facebook has suffered a major outage that has hit both its website and smartphone and tablet apps across the globe.

The outage prevents users accessing the social network leading many to decamp to other services like Google+ and Twitter.