FaceBook was down this afternoon for an estimated 18 minutes and as we have come to know, it made the lives of the FaceBook generation something slightly worse than death by a thousand cuts. Users began reporting the social network down around 3.30 p.m., bringing interaction on both Facebook’s website and mobile apps to a grinding halt. “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can,” read an error message on Facebook’s desktop site. According to reports, the outage appeared to affect users in the U.S. and Canada, as well as other parts of the world. Later, in a statement, Facebook said: “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.” Facebook had major outages in May, June and August. TechCrunch’s Josh Constine estimates Facebook loses at about $22,453 every minute it’s down around the globe. Mashable put the total downtime at 18 minutes.
