Facebook down: Twitter is up as users complain about social network outage

Office workers forced into doing work, Social media editors forced to write stories in midst of Facebook outage

Facebook is down (PA)

UPDATE: Facebook is back

Panic bled across social networks on Thursday as news spread that Facebook was down.

People who tried to access Facebook at around 9am on Thursday, perhaps to comment that something was "not news" or to wish someone they don't know well enough to text a "happy birthday" were met with a white page that simply said "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as possible." Later Google simply displayed a page saying: "This webpage is not available."

Soon Twitter was flooded with posts by users complaining that the world was ending. It was not clear whether these people were being serious or there was merely an entire social network making the same joke.

The outage was worldwide with users from Bahrain to the US to the UK complaining that they were having to go onto Pintrest for their inspirational quotes, and parents complaining they were having to whatsapp pictures of their children to their friends instead. Some even said they were forced to spend time with their offspring in the midst of the desperate June Facebook outage.

This is not the first time Facebook has gone down. Facebook went down in the US for some in February of this year. It previously went down for four hours in October, with network maintenance blamed for the freeze. It went down before that in August 2012. In the movie about Facebook, 'The Social Network', founder Mark Zuckerberg was famously quoted saying Facebook would never go down.

UPDATE: Facebook is back.