Facebook restores service after outage in many countries

SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook Inc said service to the world's largest online social network was fully restored on Friday (Saturday in PHL), following a widespread outage that affected users in multiple countries.

"Earlier this morning, some people had trouble accessing Facebook for a short time. We quickly investigated and have fully restored service for everyone. We're sorry for the inconvenience," Facebook said in an emailed statement.

Facebook, which has 1.32 billion monthly users, is still investigating the incident, but all signs suggest a "technical" failure rather than any suspicious activity, said a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because the probe is private.

Some visitors to the site on Friday were greeted with a message that read "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

It was not immediately clear how widespread the disruption was, though Reuters was aware of users having trouble accessing the site in the United States, Chile and India. — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Facebook Q4 revenue rises more than expected

SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook Inc's fourth-quarter revenue jumped 63 percent, beating Wall Street targets, as the Internet company's mobile ad sales continued to accelerate.

Shares of Facebook were up 7 percent at $57.36 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.

The world's largest social networking company said that revenue from mobile ads represented 53 percent of its total advertising revenue in the last three months of the year, or $1.24 billion, versus the 49 percent proportion that mobile ads represented in the third quarter.

Facebook said it now has 1.23 billion monthly users, with 945 million accessing the service on a smartphone or tablet.

Overall revenue in the fourth quarter rose to $2.585 billion, compared with $1.585 billion in the year-ago period and above the $2.33 billion expected by analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Facebook reported net income of $523 million, or 20 cents a share, versus $64 million or 3 cents a share in the year-ago period. Excluding certain items, Facebook said it earned 31 cents a share.  — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com