Facebook Korea temporarily out of service on poll day

Facebook users in Korea could not access their accounts for almost an hour on Tuesday, the presidential election day. / Korea Times file

By Eom Da-sol

Korean Facebook users could not sign into their accounts for nearly an hour on Tuesday, presidential election day.

They could not access their pages from about 10 a.m. Visitors could only see the administration team’s message in English, which said: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

A Facebook Korea spokesperson said the outage was “due to a technical problem” and apologized for the inconvenience. He did not reveal details.

“It does not seem like a problem that occurred only in Korea,” another official said, without elaborating.

This is not the first time Korean websites have gone down on a national election day. The National Election Commission website was out of service for over 50 minutes on the 12th general election day in 2012 due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by two teenagers. The website also was attacked on by-election day on Oct. 16, 2011.