Facebook suffers outage in India

New Delhi: Though Facebook is back to normal now, but the social networking site was unavailable for a number of users on Tuesday morning. However, the website was accessible via mobile apps and the mobile site - m.facebook.com, but the access from desktops was reported to be down.

The users turned to rival service Twitter to vent their frustrations at the outage.

However, Facebook has not made a statement on the matter yet but the outage seems to have been a DNS issue.

However, Facebook has not made a statement on the matter yet but the outage seems to have been a DNS issue.

This is the error message that most of the users were getting when trying to access Facebook.com using Firefox browser: "Server not found. Firefox can't find the server at www.facebook.com."

The DNS (Domain Name System) helps in accessing various websites on the Internet. It's purpose is to translate the name (of any website) people type in the Web browser address bar into the computer language i.e., a numerical IP address.

This conversion makes it possible for the computer to read and understand the address that the user has typed. It then visits that particular website via its server.

But if there is a DNS error, it means that the computer is not able to access the Internet so as to translate the typed address. Thus, the computer becomes unable to visit and access that website.

But, sometimes such an error is shown only for some particular websites. This can happen due to two reasons. First, the address that's been entered is incorrect, or there is no entry for this website over the Internet.

Besides India, Facebook, a few days back, was unavailable in some European countries because of technical problems.

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