''We're sorry'' Facebook apologise after social network crashes leaving millions of users without access to their personal data

Users lost access to their stored pictures, messages and contact details as they were greeted with the message: "Sorry, something went wrong"

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Error: Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, which had an outage this morning

Facebook has apologised after the social network crashed this morning leaving millions of users without access to their personal data.

The site, which claims to have 1.23bn monthly users, displayed an error message to users who were trying to log on.

In an unprecedented outage, visitors to the Facebook website at around 9am UK time were greeted with a message reading "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

And users of the network's mobile apps saw a network error.

It was out of action for around 20 minutes, an unprecedented crash for a website that prides itself on its reliability.

Facebook has yet to confirm the cause of the outage, but issued a brief statement, saying: "Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time.

"We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused."

The site began to function again just before 9.30am UK time.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg once gave advice to business founders by saying: "Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."

Facebook by numbers

802m

Average daily users

$2.5bn

Advertising revenue (Q1 2014)

48%

Percentage of 18-34 year old users who check Facebook when they wake up

In a post on his Facebook page, he wrote: "To keep the internet strong, we need to keep it secure.

"That's why at Facebook we spend a lot of our energy making our services and the whole internet safer and more secure.

"We encrypt communications, we use secure protocols for traffic, we encourage people to use multiple factors for authentication and we go out of our way to help fix issues we find in other people's services.

"The internet works because most people and companies do the same. We work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world."

In a post celebrating the site's 10th anniversary, he told users: "I'm so grateful to be able to help build these tools for you. I feel a deep responsibility to make the most of my time here and serve you the best I can."