Facebook goes down for 10 minutes, mass panic ensues

Residents of Planet Earth were shaken to the core early Thursday afternoon when Facebook — the social network that prides itself on being reliable — went down worldwide.

Early reports suggest that all 1.49 billion Facebook users across the globe were unable to access their accounts as of 12:30 p.m. ET, seeing error pages instead of their own newsfeeds upon navigating to the site.

"Sorry, something went wrong," read the message most users were greeted with. "We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

#Facebook's down. How do you talk to people again? Like… with your mouth? pic.twitter.com/lAeFD2x8Yk

— @Ewan_Valentine

While the site appeared to be loading again for some by approximately 12:45 p.m. ET (albeit slowly, with many features missing,) Venture Beat reports that the complete mass outage lasted at least 10 minutes. 

According to Facebook's own Platform Status for developers, the Facebook Graph API became unavailable as of 12:30 p.m. ET. The issue was said to officially resolved at 1:22 p.m. ET.

"A Facebook-wide issue means the Facebook Graph API is temporarily unavailable," read a message posted on the developers site at 12:35 p.m. ET. "We're working with our core infrastructure teams to identify the issue and will update you when we have more information."

Without a way to post, creep and comment on things within the world's most popular social network, many turned to Twitter with their updates.

#facebookdown day 1, minute 3: we still have electricity, poppa has been hoarding antibiotics and microbrews. We're gonna ride this out.

— @advodude

The best part about a #Facebook outage? Thousands of simultaneous distressed messages on Twitter in different languages. World harmony!

— @meghamora

Facebook is down. The Pope has defeated Satan. Long live Il Papa!

— @pourmecoffee

There are people on the streets hurling printed-out pics of their kids at strangers bellowing “Like them. Like them.” #facebookdown

— @MartinBelam

Facebook is down so here is a picture of me rocking my cat to sleep. pic.twitter.com/0ZKN1wJmUR

— @rickygervais

As if often the case with an internet outage of this magnitude, many made jokes about "going outside" and "getting offline" and communicating "the old way."

And millions of people across the world just did this for the first time in years. #FacebookDown pic.twitter.com/VEEalkcqE3

— @danspeerin

Stay strong, everyone. Look outside. See the birds and sky. #facebookdown

— @PeterBiello

WTF am I supposed to do while Facebook is down? Play with my kid? Surely, you jest. #facebookdown

— @nerdyemokristen

Facebook is down. Let's drive around in our cars and shout status updates from the windows. #facebookdown

— @brevitymag

How I'll be sharing photos now #FacebookDown pic.twitter.com/PI6Pi3EN1C

— @MichaelGillett

As Business Insider reports, Facebook users reacted similarly in January when the site went down for an hour due to technical issues caused by changes to configuration systems. During that outage, some users reportedly even called 911 to report the network failure.

CBC News has reached out to Facebook for comment on what may have caused this most recent service outage, and will update this story as more information is known.