Facebook crashed yesterday, leaving millions of users without access to their personal data.
The site, which claims to have 1.23bn monthly users, displayed an error message to users who were trying to log on.
In a rare outage, visitors to the Facebook website just before 5pm UK time were greeted with a message reading "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."
And users of the network's mobile apps saw a network error.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg once gave advice to business founders by saying: "Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."
In a post on his Facebook page, he wrote: "To keep the internet strong, we need to keep it secure.
"That's why at Facebook we spend a lot of our energy making our services and the whole internet safer and more secure.
"We encrypt communications, we use secure protocols for traffic, we encourage people to use multiple factors for authentication and we go out of our way to help fix issues we find in other people's services.
"The internet works because most people and companies do the same. We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world."
In a post celebrating the site's 10th anniversary, he told users: "I'm so grateful to be able to help build these tools for you. I feel a deep responsibility to make the most of my time here and serve you the best I can."
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