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Users in UAE
 exasperated
 by Facebook outage

Social media site goes off for 30 minutes from 9am

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Facebook was briefly inaccessible in the UAE and across the world on Thursday morning. The company apologised to its 1.3 billion users on its website and said the glitch had been resolved.

In the UAE, users were unable to access the site from 9am for some 30 minutes.

“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can,” read an error message when users attempted to log-on the social network.

With the site down, regular users took to Twitter. Talal Masood (@taalz) tweeted, “#Facebook is not down just in Pakistan. It is global. Not even opening in #Dubai.”

Another user, Mohammed Siddiq commented saying: “It wasn’t down for a very long time but still people addicted to social networks had a reason to complain. It is difficult to imagine what would happen if the website remained down for a longer period of time.”

Facebook did not explain the reason for the outage but confirmed there was a problem which was fixed. ‘‘Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time.

“We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

The site is hugely popular in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt reporting high levels of penetration.

According to statistics, the total number of Facebook users in the UAE stands at 3,593,704, with 69 per cent of the users being males, while 31 per cent are females

Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the two emirates with more developed economies, have the highest concentration of Facebook users in the UAE. Dubai has 2,310,797 Facebook users which constitutes about 64 per cent of the total users in the UAE.

The last time the site went down was in 2010 due to a configuration values error. The outage lasted two-and-a-half hours.

muaz@khaleejtimes.com

• UAE