NEW YORK — Facebook has resolved whatever technical glitches had plagued it on Thursday afternoon and caused the world’s largest social network to be unavailable for some of its members.
In a statement, the company apologized but did not explain what went wrong. Some of Facebook’s 500 million users worldwide were shut out of the site entirely; others experienced sluggish page-load times. Problems were spotted in the U.S., Europe and South America. The issues started at about 2:05 p.m. EDT, said Vik Chaudhary, a vice-president at website monitoring company Keynote Systems.
People were having problems accessing the site for about four hours, he said. Keynote, which monitors website traffic in the U.S., found that over the course of the four hours, Facebook was unavailable to 22 per cent of those who tried to access it. Normally the site’s accessibility hovers close to 100 per cent, Chaudhary said.