Facebook outage hits some users on East Coast

An unknown number of Facebook users were disconnected from the social media site for a short time Monday afternoon. Some who tried to access the popular social network were shown a broken error message reading, "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

Outages hit users on the East Coast and spread, according to downdetector.com. Users soon took to Twitter to vent or joke, with #FacebookDown trending, and people expressing their need to get a social media fix in humorous ways, including one tweet from the official feed for Dictionary.com, which defined Twitter as a noun and a place we all go to talk about Facebook being down.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the outage and a subsequent resolution to the problem: "Earlier today, a routine test caused users to have trouble accessing or posting to all Facebook services including WhatsApp and Instagram. We quickly investigated and restored access for everyone. We're sorry for the inconvenience."

Facebook's stock price was down more than 2 percent on Monday to around $141.77 per share, largely from continued selling pressures by major investors lowering their growth estimates for the company.