Access to Facebook's website and apps went down just before 4 a.m. ET on Thursday, shutting out millions of users for a brief period.

For about half an hour, users who tried to access Facebook in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Israel and India received the following message: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

Problems were also reported across multiple nations in Asia and the Middle East. Shortly after the outage, #Facebookdown started trending all over the world on Twitter.

Attempts by USA TODAY to reach the Menlo Park, Calif.,-based social networking company for a fuller explanation of the disruptions were not immediately successful.

In April, Facebook's revenue rocketed 72% higher to $2.5 billion.

[Posted by JTM]