Facebook users were unable to access their accounts for about 20 minutes. Google users were also affected by a similar situation that lasted about 40 minutes before the problems were corrected.
The issue that affected many Facebook users, who couldn't access their accounts via desktop. Mobile users were unaffected.
"Earlier today we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site," A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider about the outage. "We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience."
DNS- Domain-name service is a part of Internet's network which connects other machines in the network to find one another in the global network.
A similar outage was experienced by Facebook users in December 2010. Users noticed strange features in Facebook photos and in order to fix the problem Facebook took down the site and removed the code for the new features which was crept accidentally.
Many Gmail users also realized that they were unable to access their emails via desktop or mobiles. The Google team reported a downtime 11.30 A.M. (PST) and reported not everyone were experiencing the same problem. The service outage lasted for about 40 minutes from 11.30 A.M. till 12.10 P.M.
Gmail issued a statement about the outage, published in Slash Gear:
"The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better." - Google, 12:10 PM PST.
"We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly." - Google, 11:30 AM PST.
