Global Facebook outage forces millions to taste life without social media

Facebook grappled on Thursday with a widespread outage, forcing millions of people to taste life without the world’s largest social media platform.

It was probably the last thing Facebook needed as it stumbles from problem to problem, including outrage over its use of customers’ private data.

The outage began on Wednesday afternoon and triggered a flood of gripes on downdetector.com, which tracks trouble accessing online pages, and on rival Twitter.

A Downdetector map late Wednesday showed Facebook service troubles persisting in parts of Australia, Asia, Europe, South America and North America.