Facebook down: Social networking site suffers brief outage

The social networking website Facebook suffered what appeared to be a global outage on Wednesday afternoon, but it was resolved in less than 30 minutes. The cause was not immediately known.

The problems began at about 2:20 p.m. ET on Wednesday when people in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other parts of the world reported being unable to reach Facebook or Facebook Messenger.

“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can,” an error message said. On other attempts, it only returned a blank page.

It was not immediately known what caused the problem, but it was quickly resolved. Most users were able to access Facebook by 2:40 p.m., less than 30 minutes after the outage began.

Facebook is the biggest social networking website in the world with nearly 2.4 billion monthly active users, or roughly 31 percent of the world’s population. About 1.5 billion people are using the website every day.