Facebook and Tumblr websites suffer outage on same day

Users take to Twitter to express their concern: 'Workplace productivity is at an all-time high'

Facebook went down for the third time in three months (Getty Images)

Social media sites Facebook and Tumblr both went offline on Wednesday, prompting jokes on Twitter about the end of the world and global productivity hitting an all-time high.

Facebook’s outage was the third time in three months that the site had gone down.

The company said in a statement: “Earlier today we encountered an error while making an infrastructure configuration change that briefly made it difficult for people to access Facebook.

“We immediately discovered the issue and fixed it, and everyone should now be able to connect.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and will thoroughly investigate this issue so we can learn from it and ensure that Facebook is there when people need it.”

Tumblr attempted to take a light-hearted approach.

“Hayyy guys. We thought Facebook’s outage today was pretty cool, so we wanted to have one too. They did 15 minutes, and we topped them with a full 20… kidding,” it said.

“Our primary data centre’s connection to the internet was interrupted during routine maintenance, leaving Tumblr and all blogs briefly inaccessible.

“The issue was corrected, and our engineering team will be thoroughly reviewing these procedures. Please know that we are constantly working to ensure that your blogs are fast and accessible all the time, all over the world. Our sincerest apologies for this interruption.”

Users of the sites took to Twitter to express their concern.

One, ‏@cheerfulester, said: “Facebook is down, Tumblr is down, the world is ending.”

Another, Lucas Neff, said: “How will I watch puppies wag their tails or juggle or ride bicycles now?!”

While the OMG Facts ‏Twitter account said: “Facebook is down for most of the world. Workplace productivity is at an all-time high.”