Facebook's website crashed briefly on Thursday, 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 Britain 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.

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 percent," he said. "We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused." - Reuters