( CNN ) -- Those early birds who start their day with a visit to Facebook were met Thursday morning with a rare error message : The social media giant appeared to be down . News of the widespread outage spread on Twitter around 4 a.m . ET and lasted for about 30 minutes . The outage impacted both Facebook 's website and its mobile apps . `` Sorry , something went wrong , '' read the error message , which appeared when users tried to access Facebook . `` We 're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can . '' By daybreak on the East Coast of the U.S. , all was well . But it was a rare blip for the world 's most popular social platform , which co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has famously vowed would never crash . `` Earlier this morning , we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time , '' Facebook spokesman Iain Waterman told CNN . `` We resolved the issue quickly , and we are now back to 100 % . We 're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused . '' New Facebook app forces you to trade messages . So what do Facebook 's 1.2 billion users do when the network is down ? Some of them flocked to Twitter , of course . Analytics site Topsy showed that tweets with the words `` Facebook '' and `` down , '' usually barely a blip on the screen , rocketed to over 70,000 in Thursday 's early hours . While some users bemoaned their inability to access Facebook , many took a lighter look at the issue . `` Either Facebook is down or Mark Zuckerberg just set everything to PRIVATE , '' humor site 9GAG posted . They followed up minutes later : `` Facebook users are now roaming the streets in tears , showing photos of themselves in people 's faces & screaming 'DO YOU LIKE THIS ? DO YOU ? '' A fate worse than social-media death , to be sure . `` A moment of silence for all of those who had to interact face to face # facebookdown , '' added user @ topsupstore . But what of the vital information Facebook provides ? `` Facebook went down and I momentarily had no idea what someone I worked with in 2005 's dog had been doing this morning , '' someone tweeted under the handle @ cluedont .
It was down for about 30 minutes early Thursday . The site , and its apps , were offline around 4 a.m . Thursday . People flocked to Twitter to chat , joke .