Facebook’s website crashed briefly today, temporarily preventing computer and mobile phone users from reaching the site around the globe.

During the outage, Facebook users ranging from Australia to South Korea to India and Ireland were greeted with a message saying "Sorry, something went wrong".

The cause of the outage was not immediately known. Its exact duration could not be confirmed but service was restored in less than an hour.

Nonetheless, the incident represents one of its longest service disruptions in recent times.

It prevented users from posting to the social networking site “for a brief period of time”, a Facebook spokesman said.

“We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 per cent,” he said. “We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

The outage hit both its website, smartphone and tablet apps with users venting their frustration on Google+ and on Twitter .

The company has yet to offer an explanation on its own site .

Reuters