Facebook went down for a couple of minutes and lots of people freaked out

Social media users were lost without the network when it was momentarily out of action
Down and out: Facebook suffered an outage in the early afternoon
Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images
Ben Travis21 April 2016

Panic stations, everyone: Facebook went down for a short period earlier today, which is more or less a sign of the coming apocalypse in social media terms.

The social network slowed to a crawl for some users and was unable to connect for many, leading to an influx of panicked statuses on Twitter.

Despite being down for just a matter of minutes, a lot of people couldn't cope when the site was out of action - and made plenty of sarcastic jokes about it.

Luckily the whole thing was turned around quickly, so everyone could get back to their business of mindlessly checking Facebook every couple of minutes.

The social media site is expected to undergo a redesign in the near future with some US users seeing posts on their timeline organised by topic.

Speaking to Mashable, a spokesperson for Facebook said: "People have told us they’d like options to see more stories on Facebook around specific topics they’re interested in.

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"So we have been testing a few feeds for people to view more and different stories from people and pages based on topic areas."

For anyone currently seeing the new design, expect a bunch of posts about, well, Facebook going down.

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