Social networking website Facebook was down earlier today (March 7), for around two hours, sending users from around the world to alternative social media such as Twitter. A statement released by Facebook blames technical problems for the site being unavailable to “a number of users in Europe,” and goes on to say the problem has now been fixed. Users in Asia also reported problems.

Hackers have allegedly threatened to attack the site, but no official mention of hackers being responsible for the outage has been made.

The financial world is atwitter over Facebook's initial public offering (IPO), planned for this year, when the company hopes to raise EUR 5 billion. Estimates put the company's value at up to USD 100 billion, but Bloomberg has not included founder Mark Zuckerberg in its top 20 of the world's wealthiest, as his share package in the world's biggest social network is estimated to value less than the USD 22.6 billion necessary to get on the ranking.

Liam Lever, liam@romania-insider.com