Facebook hit with outages; Office managers everywhere rejoice

Nothing will bring an uptick to office productivity faster than a Facebook outage.

The site appears to be experiencing problems and Facebook addicts around the globe are doing exactly what you'd expect them to do: they're tweeting about it.

Details about the outage - the source of the problem, how long it's expected to be down or how widespread it is - are still unknowns. Of course, by the time this post even publishes, the site may be back up.

Facebook reportedly had some service outages yesterday, related to networking issues, but the company tells Mashable today that the site issues today are unrelated to what happened yesterday.

Be on the lookout for slow-loading pages or problems "liking" news articles across the Internet.

updated: 3:05 p.m PT - Facebook is back up, the company confirms in a tweet. The company did not offer an explanation for the outage.

updated: 7:05 p.m. PT - Facebook offers good technical detail of the outage in a blog post and apologizes.

Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned.

The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.