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Facebook blinks

DUBAI - Popular social networking site Facebook faced downtime in the UAE alongside several other countries worldwide, for a few hours yesterday morning.

In a statement issued to news agency AP, Facebook said that technical problems made the site unavailable to some of its European users.

However, net users who took to other social networking platforms such as Twitter to sound the alert reported that the site was also down in the UAE and other parts of the Middle East. A number of UAE users said that they were unable to connect on their desktops while the site was accessible on some smartphone applications such as those for BlackBerry and iPhone.

A number of tweeps said the site was down in the Middle East, Europe and South Africa (from 8.30am UAE time).

Users from other countries such as UK, Germany, Pakistan, Iceland, Turkey, Spain and South Africa also said that the site was not accessible for hours.

A statement released to AP by the social networking site’s London-based public relations agency says that the issue “has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook.”

The scale and length of the outage remained unclear. A representative said she had no immediate information on the problems or their nature, the agency reported. Facebookdown was also trending on Twitter yesterday where people worldwide tweeted about the outage.

Khaleej Times online users also said that the site was down from 8am to 12 noon. “I have had trouble for more than three hours,” wrote Mudi Hbk, a KT reader. “It was between 8.30 am to 12,” he added. “The problem is being faced by both mobile FB and PC site,” wrote Hina Abbas, another reader.

asmaalizain@khaleejtimes.com