A Facebook software problem temporarily prevented users from connecting with a number of websites that use Facebook Connect to add new user accounts.

The software problem redirected the users to a broken Facebook page which showed an error message. Websites hit by the problem included sites Digital Spy, Daily Mail, Washington Post, ABC, Hulu and many others.

A Facebook spokesperson said: "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," said the spokesperson.

Last year, Facebook said that it fixed an outage caused by certain changes to its DNS infrastructure which left some of its users unable to access its social network.

In December 2012, a bug in Facebook was exposed allowing private photos of CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be downloaded.