Facebook comes back online: Social network returns after 30-minute global outage leaves users frustrated

THE world's popular social networking site of Facebook went down tonight across the world, leaving users unable to log in.

Users hit Twitter to express their angst about Facebook being down, after they got this error message from Facebook.

The outage hit its desktop website, smartphone and tablet apps.

The site, which boasts 1.28 billion monthly users, has retued after being unavailable to users for 20 minutes to under an hour.

The error message ... as Facebook went down today worldwide. Source: Supplied

Those on Twitter started the hashtag #facebookdown as they continued to live without Facebook for the first time in their life.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg has been widely quoted as saying Facebook would never crash.

Facebook has apologised for the inconvenience in a statement.

'We experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time,” the company said.

'We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 per cent.”

A Facebook spokesman would not specify how many users were affected or elaborate on what caused the problem.