Facebook had a temporary bug with its embedded widgets, pulling millions from various Web sites to Facebook itself only to display an error message.

The glitch has now been fixed, but for a while it left some of the world's largest sites inaccessible, including CNN, NBC News, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and many more. Basically, when users tried to access an account that was linked to Facebook, the social networking site pulled them from the respective Web site and transferred them to a Facebook error page instead.

Follow us

The Next Web's (TNW) Alex Wilhelm first tweeted about this issue at 4:15 P.M. on Thursday, Feb. 7, after attempting to access a news site.

"Reading article. Dragged from two diff sites to Facebook, which displays what appears to be a permission error. Wa?" tweeted Wilhelm.

The glitch was ultimately linked to Facebook Connect and was fixed around 4:40 P.M. after the social networking site had already hijacked the Internet and taken millions of hostages.

Facebook acknowledged that it had a bug and issued a statement assuring users that the glitch had been fixed, but did not elaborate further on the matter.

"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," the social networking giant said in a short statement issued to the media.

Until the issue was resolved, millions of users trying to log in to other Web sites using their Facebook account were redirected to Facebook's own site and greeted by the error message: "An error occurred. Please try again later."

While Facebook acknowledged the issue and announced it had resolved it, the social networking giant did not apologize in any way for stealing millions of pageviews from its partners. In fact, as TNW points out, Facebook did not even say how it plans to avoid such issues from occurring again.

This time, the only way to escape the issue was to log out of Facebook altogether and try to visit other Web sites afterwards. The issue further highlights how ubiquitous Facebook widgets are and how wide-reaching Facebook Connect actually is. The incident highlights the vulnerabilities and how a single site can wreak havoc on the Internet.

Join Our Conversation

Smartphones

LG to launch always-on, voice-controlled smartphone next year

BlackBerry Q10 arriving on AT&T on June 21

HTC unleashes Butterfly S: Price, specs, availability

Huawei wants to acquire Nokia, calls Windows Phone "weak"

Tablet / Laptop / PC

Microsoft Surface RT 2 to rock Qualcomm 800 chip, Windows 8.1

AT&T Galaxy Note 8.0 LTE costs $399.99 on contract, $199.99 with smartphone bundles

Chromebooks land on Walmart, more retailers to get it soon

Apple's next iPad mini 7.9 inch Retina display will be Samsung-made

Gadgets

Nintendo 3DS outsold Microsoft Xbox 360 in the U.S.

AMD moves from Intel's x86 platform to ARM for servers

OUYA team and E3 organizers battle over parking lot space

Sony PlayStation 4 to be available at $399 at the end of this year

OS / Software

PS3 latest software update 4.45 bricking the consoles

Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean update for Sony Xperia Z spotted in video

Windows Phone 8 GDR2 update reportedly coming in July

iOS 7 Beta comes with a bug that opens the lock screen to access photos [Video]

Internet / Social Media

Microsoft Socl adds meme generator and GIF creator

What to expect from Facebook's June 20 event

WWDC 2013: OS X 10.9 Mavericks Safari is going to help you extend battery life

Samsung Galaxy S3 browser bug spikes data usage, slows loading times

What's App

Microsoft paying app developers up to $100,000 to bring content to Windows Phone 8

Windows 8.1 brings newly updated Xbox Music app

Instagram may add video on June 20 to challenge Twitter's Vine

Microsoft Office now available for iPhones, but there's a catch