Watching ‘The Social Network', you can see just how much Facebook's founders value ‘up time'. They are almost maniac about it. In the real world, the globe's second biggest site does a great job of staying up and running, but something strange seems to have hit the interwibble this evening. KitGuru puts personal pic updates on pause to investigate.

Seeing Facebook down for a few seconds for a few people is quite unusual. Seeing it being unavailable for huge chunks of the globe for quite a while is very unusual.

To back up the sense that ‘Maybe the Mayans were right', GMail decides to pick the same time/date/space vector to fall over as well.

At the time of typing, the web is crackling with reports of outages – at least one of which belongs to us. You're reading it.

How long it takes to re-initialise a service as big as GMail or Facebook is anyone's guess.

Let's hope they have a backup.

KitGuru says: It may well be ‘panic mode over' by the time you read this, but the outages for both Facebook and GMail were substantial – so we'll be interested in seeing what the official line is from their respective spin doctors. We'd LOVE to be able to blame timeslime.

Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.

UPDATE: Using your best ‘American Colonel in a Disaster Movie' voice, pretend the aliens have arrived and state, “My God. They've taken out Facebook”…

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