Facebook went dark for nearly 20 minutes on Wednesday afternoon, plunging its users in a wave of distress.

Facebook, the world's largest social networking site, suffered a brief outage due to an internal maintenance issue. As a result, people stormed to Twitter to report the outage.

"Earlier today we encountered an error while making an infrastructure configuration change that briefly made it difficult for people to access Facebook," a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. "We immediately discovered the issue and fixed it, and everyone should now be able to connect. 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."

The Facebook outage was reported on the downdetector.com website, which tracks any service interruptions on a website. According to the site, the outage started at 3:41 p.m. EST and lasted till about 3:59 p.m. EST. Facebook has reported several outages in recent weeks. The social network went down for a brief time in August and people started calling 911 to report the issue. Also, in June, Facebook was inaccessible for nearly 30 minutes, which spiked Twitter's traffic with tweets about #facebookdown.

In traditional fashion, Twitter users mocked Facebook's downtime tagged under the hashtag #facebookdown. Although there are hundreds of funny tweets under the hashtag, we sorted a few selected ones and embedded them below.

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