A Facebook bug that redirected visitors from other websites to the social media site's error page was resolved, Facebook told The Huffington Post in an email on Thursday. 

A bug redirected millions from the websites they were visiting to Facebook itself onThursday, making some of the largest websites in the world inaccessible for some time. Visitors to sites such as CNN, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Gawker network (including Gizmodo), and NBC News were routed to a Facebook error page upon loading the intended site, according to MSN. The message read "An error occurred. Please try again later."

Internet users that were not logged into Facebook did not get the error, according to the news report, leading many to believe the problem was stemmed from the Facebook Connect service that is responsible for "likes," "comments" and other features of the social network.

"For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people from third party sites with Facebook Login to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved," Facebook said. 

On NBCNews.com, the interference lasted on Thursday for less than 15 minutes - from 4:30 to 4:42 p.m. PT - and ReadWriteWeb said the bug lasted about an hour, from 4 to 5 p.m. PT.

For about a half hour, Twitter users and several editors at The Huffington Post's New York office said they were directed to a Facebook error page while surfing the web. The incident worried many who thought it was disturbing that one website can hijack a large part of the Internet and millions of its users, even if the incident was accidental.

Tags: facebook