The social media site Facebook experienced a short outage yesterday but services have been restored, the Menlo Park-based company said.

“Earlier today we encountered an error while making an infrastructure configuration change that briefly made it difficult for people to access Facebook,” said a company spokesperson in a statement provided to dpa.

The problem was discovered immediately and solved, the statement said.

The outage lasted for about 20 minutes and impacted users worldwide, according to multiple media reports.

The service was restored just before 2100 GMT.

Facebook had major outages in June and August.

The latest outage once again sparked a flood of humorous tweets on rival networking site Twitter under the hashtag #facebookdown.

“During the Facebook outage some people resorted to ‘performing duties outlined in their job description’ Pray for them. #facebookdown,” said one Twitter user.

“Thousands are roaming the streets in tears shoving photos screaming ‘DO YOU LIKE THIS?! DO YOU?!’ #facebookdown,” posted another Twitter user.

- dpa