Facebook users unable to post comments, send messages due to problems

As of last morning, Facebook has been experiencing errors across the site. Many users could not update their status, post comments, send messages or post photos. Users were also not able to 'Like' posts.

Status update attempts yielded the message: "There was a problem updating your status. Please try again in a few minutes."

Issues regarding status update on Facebook are not unknown, but this one seemed to be a global phenomenon, as those who tested it from several IPs reported receiving the same message.

Web service status tracker Downrightnow, said Facebook was likely experiencing a service disruption.

Facebook was inundated with comments about the apparent service outage as complaints poured in by the second.

According to a spokesman for Facebook, while performing some network maintenance, the company experienced an issue that prevented some users from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time.

He added the social network had resolved the issue quickly and it was now back to 100 per cent. He added the network regretted any inconvenience it may have caused.

Sky News quoted Michael Allen, a director at Compuware Corporation, which tracks internet down time using its Outage Analyzer tool, as saying the technical problems would have had an "enormous impact" on millions of people.

He added at least 3,500 other websites were affected, "although the actual number is likely to be far greater".

He added, this was because many other businesses and websites were connected to Facebook through the integration of its services.

He added that Facebook was used to enable people to login to many other sites and applications.

Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerburg, the social network has around 700 million daily active users, according to its own figures.

At its three data centres in Oregon, North Carolina and Iowa, as well as a fourth in Lulea, Sweden, it stores over 100 petabytes (107 billion megabytes) of photos and videos.