Facebook users were prevented from accessing their accounts on Wednesday afternoon after the popular online social networking account went down, Business Today reported.

Those who attempted to log in to their Facebook accounts were redirected to a white page with the message, "Sorry, something went wrong. We are working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

The site went down at around 3:40 p.m. on Wednesday. Posts from users on other social networking sites indicated that the temporary outage was experienced in other countries as well such as Germany, Portugal and Thailand.

According to Facebook, the outage, which lasted for less than 20 minutes, occurred while the company was conducting a configuration change to the site.

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

"We immediately discovered the issue and fixed it, and everyone should now be able to connect," the company added. "We apologize for the inconvenience and will thoroughly investigate this issue so we can learn from it and ensure that Facebook is there when people need it."

During the outage, numerous users turned to their other online accounts to report the incident. Others, though, took it as an opportunity to joke about not being on Facebook, according to Mirror.

"The best thing about Facebook being down is not being able to see your friend Ice Bucket Challenge videos," Twitter user Tom Warren wrote.

"Stay calm. Life will go one without Facebook people, just as long as Twitter stays up," Pam Moore posted.

"Poor Twitter. Everyone only comes on here to talk about Facebook being down," another user tweeted.

Almost during the same time while Facebook was down, users of the online auction site eBay experienced the same problem, BBC reported.

Many of them could not access their accounts and even received alerts for inputting incorrect passwords.

Ryan Moore, the spokesperson for eBay said the problem was caused by a scheduled server maintenance procedure.

"We're working to resolve this issue quickly and will continue to keep our customers updated," he said. "We apologize for any inconvenience to our users."