Facebook users panic after site shut down: Is the world over?

The world experienced a collective meltdown earlier today when Facebook crashed for just 12 minutes. The social media site went down at 12.31pm ET (5.31pm BST), but is now up and running for most users. During the difficult few minutes, millions of people all over the world were unable to log on - and many took to Twitter to express their distress.  Facebook's error page had an automated message which said the site was 'working on it' and would 'get it fixed as soon as we can'. 

The hashtag #facebookdown immediately started trending on Twitter, which remained operational. Peter Biellow tweeted: 'Stay strong, everyone. Look outside. See the birds and sky.' 'Oh my DAYZZz #Facebook #facebookdown...is this the end of the world? Or did someone trip over the plug?' wrote DJ James Jay. Facebook's 'Platform Status' page, which is used to communicate when the site is broken, appeared to also be having technical problems. Downdetector.com's Facebook map showed outages in North America, Europe, Australia and India

 The last time Facebook went down was in January when hackers from online group Lizard Squad claimed they shut down the site. Facebook, which also owns Instagram, denied they were hacked at the time and blamed the outage on 'a change that affected our configuration systems'. Facebook had 1.25 billion monthly active users at the end of September last year.  See more tweets and comments after the cut...