Facebook outage hits users in many parts of the world

Late last evening, thousands of Facebook users across the world, specifically Asia, could not to log in to their accounts. It is not clear what caused the error that led many people from parts of New Zealand, Australia and North America to be affected.

Users took to Twitter to express their disappointment over their inability to log in. ''The hashtags #facebookdown and #facebookisdown were gaining traction on Twitter within 10 minutes of the crash,'' Stuff reported.

The social network later released a statement saying, ''Earlier today, some Facebook users were unable to access Facebook briefly due to a technical issue. We have now fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience caused.''

The site resumed normal operations after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Facebook displayed an error message, "Sorry, something went wrong and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

Later, a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement, "Earlier today, some Facebook users were unable to access Facebook briefly due to a technical issue. We have now fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience caused."

DownDetector.com said, the outage, which also appeared to be affecting Facebook's mobile app and Messenger, also spread to parts of North America.

WhatsApp, Facebook's messaging service also suffered a widespread global outage last week that lasted for several hours before being resolved, according to the company.

WhatsApp went down in parts of India, Canada, the US and Brazil, affecting people who use the service on Apple's iOS operating system, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows mobile OS.

In Brazil, where the professional class relies heavily on the service, WhatsApp was down for about two and a half hours. Many users turned to rival system Telegram, which had picked up millions of customers in Brazil after two previous WhatsApp outages resulting from court orders.