Facebook Toys With Our Minds, Crashes Briefly, Then Comes Back to Life The addictive social network suffered an outage today, but lucky for social-media addicts the world over, the horror is already over.

By Kim Lachance Shandrow

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

No status updates. No pics. No check-ins. No Facebook. Only a frustratingly vague error message that read "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

Such was the case earlier today, when the world's biggest social media network was as good as dead for 35 long, excruciating minutes. It was down and out. The rare outage left some 1.2 billion users without access to their accounts and the endless array of tempting distractions they offer.

Related: Facebook Suffers 30-Minute Outage, Twitterverse Goes Ballistic

The only clue as to why Facebook went down appeared on Facebook's official status page. The message, titled "Increased errors/latency on all Platform surfaces," in the company's "issue history" on the page read: "Facebook is currently experiencing an issue that is affecting all API and web surfaces. Our engineers detected the issue quickly and are working to resolve it ASAP. We'll update shortly."

Shortly was right. Only 35 minutes isn't that long to wait. Actually, it was hellacious for some, as evidenced, of course, on Twitter. It's no surprise that the rival social media site exploded with angry and hilarious reactions to the crash, just as it did the last few times Facebook tanked.

Related: Pondering Facebook's Future, Zuckerberg More 'Excited' By Messaging Than Photos

Wavy Line
Kim Lachance Shandrow

Former West Coast Editor

Kim Lachance Shandrow is the former West Coast editor at Entrepreneur.com. Previously, she was a commerce columnist at Los Angeles CityBeat, a news producer at MSNBC and KNBC in Los Angeles and a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times. She has also written for Government Technology magazine, LA Yoga magazine, the Lowell Sun newspaper, HealthCentral.com, PsychCentral.com and the former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. C. Everett Coop. Follow her on Twitter at @Lashandrow. You can also follow her on Facebook here

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