Facebook's global 30-minute outage leaves users frustrated

Facebook today experienced a global outage that left its over 1.2 billion users, including those in India, unable to access the world's largest social networking portal.

For about 30 minutes, users logging into the website saw the message: "Sorry something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

The services were later resumed.

A Facebook spokesperson here said "an issue" prevented some users from posting on Facebook.

"Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented some users from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly and we are now back to 100 per cent. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused," he said, without divulging details.

In February this year, Facebook went down in the US for some time, while in October last year it faced a similar situation, with the website citing network maintenance as a reason. In August 2012, there was a similar outage.

With Facebook down, netizens took to microblogging site Twitter to vent their frustration.

While many compared the outage to an "apocalypse", others mocked the situation saying "people may now have to talk to each other face to face".

In India, #facebookdown was one of the top trending topics on Twitter.

Facebook has over 1.2 billion users globally, of which over 100 million are from India, its second-largest user base.