Facebook goes down in parts of Europe

Internet users in Europe and parts of Asia were unable to access the world’s biggest social networking website Facebook this morning.

At around 6.45am GMT users in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Germany, Russia and Turkey said that they were unable to reach the website from their desktop machines.

Users in Nepal, Egypt, Abu Dhabi, Pakistan, Korea and elsewhere were also reporting problems. During the outage some Twitter users reported success in reaching the website via mobile devices.

The issue has now been resolved. Host-tracker, a service which monitors accessibility of internet websites, reports no problem in all 42 Facebook DNS-servers located in Europe, Asia and North America.

A Facebook statement said: “Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of users.

“The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologise for any inconvenience.”

Some Twitter users had speculated that the site was attacked by hacktivist group Anonymous or the LulzSec spin-off.

Facebook, which has about 845 million active users worldwide, last month announced plans to raise $5 billion in an IPO expected to value the company at between $75 billion and $100 billion.

Facebook servers are considered to be among the most secure in the world.

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