Facebook Outage In Europe and Asia, New Facebook Messenger For Windows
Facebook users in some parts of Europe and Asia experienced problems accessing the social network today.
According to Belfast Telegraph, at around 6.45am GMT users in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Germany, Russia and Turkey were unable to reach the website from their desktop machines, and users in Nepal, Egypt, Abu Dhabi, Pakistan, Korea also reported having the same problems. The glitch lasted for about two hours but has now been resolved.
“Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of users in Europe,” Facebook said. “The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
During the service outage, Facebookers turned to Twitter to vent out their frustrations. Some still saw humor in the incident, stating that they’d be more productive at work, but some, whose sites rely on Facebook for login, were more than frustrated.
“Facebook two hours down time this morning may make us rethink our login strategy,” remarked Tariq Krim, founder of cloud-based service Jolicloud and news aggregator Netvibes.
Facebook Messenger for Windows
Facebook also officially launched the Facebook Messenger for Windows today. Facebook Messenger is a new Windows desktop app that allows users to see and respond to Facebook activity, including chat messages, so they’re always connected to their friends.
“The app was largely built by our engineering team based in Seattle,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “Clearly, desktop apps were relatively high on the to-do list for this team. ‘Our focus is to enable people to access Messenger from the platform of their choice.’”
The desktop app is available only for Windows users at the moment, but the Facebook team is already working on a Mac version of the app. No news yet for Linux. On the mobile side, however, Facebook Messenger is available for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices.
Facebook For Peace
Israeli President Shimon Peres sat down with Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg for a live streamed conversation between the two. During their converation, Peres stated how Facebook was paving the way for a peaceful relationship between Israel and other Arab countries.
“What you are doing is convincing people they don’t have reason to hate,” Peres said in response to a question from a Facebook engineer about how the social network could help promote peace in the Middle East.
That’s a good sign for Facebook, a network who’s founder drives for such global conversation on the popular network. It’s indicative of how social media can transcend certain elements of conflict, providing a platform for discourse between parties.
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