What happens when the world’s largest social media network goes offline for a few hours?

The first casualty was, somewhat surprisingly, not the people wondering if their virtual crops were going to wither, but rather the news service that reported the outage. As Twitter posts rocketed with thousands of people asking the question “is Facebook down?” the wired news network at wired.com ground to a halt as thousands tried to log on to read the simple one line post: “Facebook.com is suffering technical difficulties and goes offline worldwide”.

Many would think that Facebook being offline would increase productivity, but the knock-on effects have proved to be astounding. As well as Facebook’s main servers not being reachable, one of the even greater usages for Facebook was knocked out of balance as well: the small but very significant “like” button. Facebook is the world’s largest social network with over half a billion users worldwide and the like button shown on websites, articles and pictures scattered over the web far exceeds that number.

Problems using the Facebook website are nothing new – slow servers, messages going missing, and changes to the interface can make Facebook a very frustrating experience sometimes. The privacy concerns are also worrying sometimes, and many users have complained about the seemingly temperamental Facebook chat application. This is however the first time that Facebook has “gone offline completely” since it became mainstream.

So how significant is this outage really? Here in Malta it happened about 9 p.m. At about 10.30 p.m, Google switched off its live news updates and live twitter feeds because the servers were becoming overwhelmed with the amount of people searching for news. Within an hour of the service being down, over 1.5 million posts were available from Google to peruse, all saying the same thing: Facebook down due to “technical problems”.

So what do half a billion internet users do when their ‘fix’ of spying on other people’s lives or tending their virtual asparagus is suddenly not available? While Facebook is down you can actually do something productive like research something interesting on Google or Wikipedia, browse some restaurant reviews or maybe read up on some local events.

One other idea is take a break from your computer to take care of other important things like reading a book, or cleaning the house or maybe just keep hitting f5 until the website comes back online.

Mr Timpano is the owner of freelanceitmalta.com, a local technology services company.