While frustrated Belizeans around the country voiced their opinions as to the cause of Facebook’s outage last night, reports started coming in that the major social network was having difficulty across Latin America as its users were not experiencing difficulties logging in and accessing the site.
Rants from blaming Belize Telemedia to 2012 predictions streamed across functioning Facebook walls, Twitter and messages all across the country of Belize all of last night, Friday, January 6, 2012, as Facebook in the country went down from about 7p.m. up until early in the morning the following day.
But while many pointed fingers at BTL intentional blockage of Facebook, reports have surfaced on the internet that all of Latin America was having difficulties with Facebook. Reports indicated that a significant number of people on twitter were reporting the outage, stemming from different places across the region, including Colombia, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Uruguay.
Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre reported the same problems in that country since last night, putting rumors that the culprit was Belize Telemedia, one of Belize’s telecommunications companies.
It was not a full outage as some users still managed to access Facebook through its mobile version and the problem is only intermittent – it’s still a fairly serious downtime for such a large platform like Facebook.
Rants from Facebook user in Belize, those who could access it with minimum usage, blamed BTL’s attempts to block VOIP, Facebook’s Video Chat and other free VPN services as being the root of the cause of the outage. Frustrated BTL customers were first to start voicing their discontent. BTL, on the other hand, told some of its frustrated callers that they were aware of the problem but that the company was not to blame.
One website says that the reason for the shutdown is that the code for several products not yet ready to launch accidentally went live on the site, so Facebook had to shut down the entire site to bring the site back to its earlier state. But while there are many rumors out there as to the cause of the outage, it remains clear that we are addicted to Facebook and its funny to see how a short blockage totally disrupted our “normal” way of life.
