Users in Europe and the US lost the ability to access the world’s biggest social network for less than an hour on Tuesday evening, according to monitoring sites and Twitter updates.

So what do we all do now? #FacebookDownpic.twitter.com/m087uDUJls — Marie Ella (@MarieEllaGER) August 16, 2016

Twitter is usefull for something... Checking in solely to discover if #Facebook is down for all... #FacebookDown — Rob (BOB!) (@LostHeartToKate) August 16, 2016

Access was restored without an explanation from the California-based company, as is often the case when problems are resolved within minutes.

Partial Facebook outages occur on an almost monthly basis, and the previous widely-reported one was only three days ago, on August 13.

The last major one was in September last year, when the network, which has more than 1.7 billion monthly users, went down across the world for about 50 minutes.

It was the third outage within a month, and resulted from unforeseen consequences of some software updates.

Facebook appears to not be working. I'm sure the productivity of the entire world has increased exponentially. #facebookdown — Clay W. Ginn (@claywginn) August 16, 2016

Facebook appears to not be working. I'm sure the productivity of the entire world has increased exponentially. #facebookdown — Clay W. Ginn (@claywginn) August 16, 2016

The longest-ever Facebook outage since it became a worldwide phenomenon occurred in 2010, when it was inaccessible for 2.5 hours.