Technical glitch causes Facebook outage

Facebook apologized for a brief outage on Thursday, citing a technical glitch that prompted the company to take the site offline for a short time.

"For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were made public to a number of people externally," a Facebook spokesman said when asked for comment. "As a result, we took the site down for a few minutes. It's back up, and we apologize for the inconvenience."

It was unclear how widespread the outage was, how long it lasted and if it was related to the rollout of new brand pages on the site. A Facebook spokeswoman provided this comment when asked additional questions: "We do not comment on future products and have nothing to announce at this time."

For more on this story, see Facebook confirms outage amid new design rollout on CNET News.