Facebook Down for a Few Minutes: Did the World Survive?

Facebook went down this morning in an apparent worldwide outage, throwing social media users into a panic and boosting the use of rival site Twitter. With no Facebook on which to share thoughts for -- what, about 23 minutes? -- Twitter was abuzz with various quips and laments about the...

By Ray Stern

August 1, 2014

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Facebook went down this morning in an apparent worldwide outage, throwing social media users into a panic and boosting the use of rival site Twitter.

With no Facebook on which to share thoughts for -- what, about 23 minutes? -- Twitter was abuzz with various quips and laments about the temporary freeze-out.

"There go the five most productive minutes of my life," Simone Sebastian tweeted when the service came back online just now.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, was down, too.

What did you do for those 25-or-so minutes -- besides refreshing your browser and tweeting?

Got a tip? Send it to: Ray Stern.

Follow Valley Fever on Twitter at @ValleyFeverPHX. Follow Ray Stern on Twitter at @RayStern.

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Ray Stern is the former news editor of Phoenix New Times. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Arizona for more than two decades. He's won numerous awards for his reporting, including the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for Investigative Journalism.