Updated: Tuesday, 11 December 2012 11:04 | By Agence France-Presse

Brief Facebook outage after infrastructure change

Facebook was unreachable briefly after the social network made a change to part of its infrastructure dealing with routing traffic to its online address.

"Earlier today, we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site," Facebook said in response to an AFP inquiry on Monday.

"We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience."

DNS refers to the Domain Name System that involves directing traffic to websites.

"Facebook isn't working; clearly the start of the end of the world," a Twitter user going by the name Jamie Chapman said in post at the one-to-many messaging service.

Earlier Monday, Gmail service was beset by disruptions that prompted users to flock to Twitter to express dismay and seek information about the Web-based email service run by Google.

An online "dashboard" that provides real-time updates regarding the status of Google services showed disruptions to both Gmail and Google Drive, which lets people store data on servers in the Internet "cloud."

The problems were solved by mid-day, according to a Google status update.