Many took to Twitter to express their distress, with

The world had a collective meltdown earlier today when Facebook shut down for 12 minutes.

The social media site went down at 12.31pm ET (5.31pm BST), but is now up and running for most users.

During the difficult few minutes, millions of people all over the world were unable to log on - and many took to Twitter to express their distress.

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The world had a collective meltdown earlier today when Facebook shut down for 12 minutes. The hashtag #facebookdown immediately started trending on Twitter, which remained operational

One comedy account wrote: 'FB users are roaming the streets in tears, shoving pictures of themselves in other people's faces yelling 'DO YOU LIKE THIS?!'

Facebook's error page had an automated message which said the site was 'working on it' and would 'get it fixed as soon as we can'.

The hashtag #facebookdown immediately started trending on Twitter, which remained operational.

Peter Biellow tweeted: 'Stay strong, everyone. Look outside. See the birds and sky.'

'Oh my DAYZZz #Facebook #facebookdown...is this the end of the world? Or did someone trip over the plug?' wrote DJ James Jay.

The world's second most popular site went down for around at 12.31pm ET (5.31pm BST). Pictured is the message users were greeted with when attempting to log on

During the difficult few minutes, millions of people all over the world were unable to log on - and many took to Twitter to express their distress

Facebook's 'Platform Status' page, which is used to communicate when the site is broken, appeared to also be having technical problems

Facebook's 'Platform Status' page, which is used to communicate when the site is broken, appeared to also be having technical problems.

Downdetector.com's Facebook map showed outages in North America, Europe, Australia and India

The last time Facebook went down was in January when hackers from online group Lizard Squad claimed they shut down the site.

Facebook, which also owns Instagram, denied they were hacked at the time and blamed the outage on 'a change that affected our configuration systems'.

Facebook had 1.25 billion monthly active users at the end of September last year.

The site has yet to respond to DailyMail.com for comment.

IMPORTANT: Facebook is down pic.twitter.com/70SUoqLda2 — Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) September 24, 2015

Facebook, which also owns Instagram, denied they were hacked at the time and blamed the outage on 'a change that affected our configuration systems'

Twitter was filled with comments on the outage, just seconds after Facebook experienced problems

Many of the tweets were humourous, such as this one from john Scalzi

James Jay DJ tweeted that the problems with Facebook could signal the end of the world