Facebook experienced a minor blip yesterday as the site was unavailable for a number of users across many European countries, including the UK, for around two hours. As well as reporting difficulties accessing Facebook.com, users of the social network’s smartphone and tablet apps also had problems.
An apology was issued by Facebook, accompanied by a statement explaining that everything was functioning normally again: “The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologise for any inconvenience.”
As you would imagine, people took to Twitter to vent their frustrations or to make quips about soaring levels of workplace productivity sweeping across the nation. However, some people actually experienced what you might call ‘real’ problems. People who run online businesses that use the Facebook Connect service were affected by the technical difficulties.
Tariq Krim, founder of news aggregator Netvibes and cloud-based service Jolicloud, tweeted: “Facebook two hours down time this morning may make us rethink our login strategy.”
While this was clearly just a minor niggle for the social network used by over 850 million people, it does serve as a timely reminder that all of the information you access on social networks – whether for private or professional purposes – may not always be available. If you never want to be cut off from your data, you can backup social networks such as Facebook (profiles and pages), Twitter, Viadeo, Google+ and LinkedIn (coming soon) with SocialSafe – your searchable offline social journal.