Facebook, the Internet's social engine that never seems to sputter, experienced a few short minutes of downtime on Thursday, starting just before 2 p.m. EST. Instead of being greeted with the usual deluge of timelines, newsfeeds, status updates and baby photos, many Facebook users saw blank white pages. No error message or 404 page, just blank white nothingess.
Predictably, this momentary lack of social noise and conversation caused many web dwellers to nearly lose control of motor and intellectual function for a few terrifying minutes. Also predictably -- as is the case for anything that happens on the Internet ever -- the momentary outage led to a fun few minutes of quips and snark on that other social network, Twitter.
We've emailed Facebook for comment on the downtime, but have not yet heard back. In the meantime, in case you missed the Facebook freak out party, these tweets will give you an idea of the social micro-zeitgeist:
1. Every tech writer is about to say... "Facebook is down" in 3, 2, 1...— Samantha Murphy (@MurphySamanthaJ) November 8, 2012
2. NOW'S YOUR CHANCE, GOOGLE+ RT @smkeyes: SOUND THE ALARMS: Facebook is down.— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) November 8, 2012
3. Is facebook down? Not that our entire office is trying to look at it.— Elise Foley (@elisefoley) November 8, 2012
4. Guys, breath. Facebook was down for less time than it took to load my Myspace page in '05. It's gonna be OK.— Kirsten Stubbs (@kirstenstubbs) November 8, 2012
5. Facebook is back up. You can stop pretending to work now.— Lisa Barone (@LisaBarone) November 8, 2012
6. I bet we all got SO much done w/ our lives when Facebook was down for those few minutes... like hitting the refresh button until it was back— Jenny Driessen (@jennydriessen) November 8, 2012
7. Finally facebook is back to normal. People posting music , pics of ugly babies, and pics of food.. This was very much missed...— Mary Ogeda(@MarySilvas1) November 8, 2012
8.I hate not being on Facebook, because I keep hoping and hoping he'll message me back. This is bad ;(— Alexis ^-^(@InLoveWithTupac) November 8, 2012
9. Crisis averted, #Facebook is back up.— Tim Akimoff (@timakimoff) November 8, 2012
10. Facebook is back. #obamasamerica— Scott Keyes (@smkeyes) November 8, 2012