Facebook Connect issue wreaks havoc on the Web

Facebook had a temporary glitch this afternoon that pulled people from different Web sites to a Facebook error message when they tried to access an account that was linked to the social-networking site.

TNW's Alex Wilhelm first tweeted about this at 4:15 p.m. after trying to read an article from a news site: "Reading article. Dragged from two diff sites to Facebook, which displays what appears to be a permissions error. Wa?"

The issue, which was related to Facebook Connect, was resolved around 4:40 p.m.

Facebook issued this statement shortly after, saying it was a bug, but the company did not elaborate further:

For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third-party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual.

This means if you logged in to other sites using your Facebook account -- a feature Facebook likes to highlight constantly -- then you would get rerouted to Facebook's site and an error message that read "An error occurred. Please try again later."

The only way to stop it was to log out of Facebook. This shows how widespread Facebook Connect is and how easily one site can cause the Internet to come screeching to a halt.