Millions of people around the world are currently unable to hear of updates of their friends’ weddings or view pictures of cats.
Facebook appears to be down for many of its 2 billion users, who’ve now taken to alternate forms of social media to voice their displeasure. Twitter, in particular, is currently full of posts complaining about the outage.
Everyone who can't access Facebook right now. #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/k5Fh26BQ9l
— Clarissa Phillips (@clarissap83) August 23, 2017
Back on Twitter only because I can't write on #Facebook that Facebook is down #facebookdown
— Davide Serafini (@serafit) August 23, 2017
#FacebookDown got social media managers like… pic.twitter.com/MbYn6VnSJ1
— Studio B61 (@studiob61) August 23, 2017
Facebook is down? So this is how it begins. The end of the world. I'll give it 12 hours before people start losing their shit #facebookdown
— Chris Saunders (@CMSaunders01) August 23, 2017
Some people didn’t seem particularly concerned.
#facebookdown?!! But how will I know how the ugly kids of people I couldn't stand at school are doing?!!
— Unnamed Insider (@Unnamedinsider) August 23, 2017
Whatever problems you're facing today, the world has bigger problems, okay? #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/seThDeZPNR
— Carmen Apostu (@carmenluiza) August 23, 2017
While others found an opportunity to dish out life advice.
Today, spend a little time cultivating relationships offline. Never forget that everybody isn't on #socialmedia. | #facebookdown #advice pic.twitter.com/gq9Lp5Lo3n
— Germany Kent ? (@GermanyKent) August 23, 2017
The outage appears most concentrated around Europe, with scatted reports around India. Europe appeared particularly hard hit, with #FacebookDown being the top Twitter trend in Italy.
The outage, however, appears confined to Chrome users. Several users pointed that that Facebook wasn’t working at all on Chrome, or lagging. As captured by this Twitter user however, it seems to be working on mobile.
#facebookdown pic.twitter.com/8jAGn2XQNW
— Quella là (@S74139706) August 23, 2017
And even on desktop, there appear to be a easy fixes to get it to work — simply opening the browser in incognito makes it load, as does holding Shift while refreshing the page. Since the outage appears confined to Chrome, switching browsers should help restore the familiar blue-white timeline.