According to Currentlydown.com, Facebook was down for about 42 minutes between 3pm ET (12:30am IST) and 4pm ET (1:30am IST).
"We are currently restoring Facebook services that people had trouble accessing earlier today due to a configuration," Facebook spokesman Jay Nancarrow said.
"We are working to bring things back to normal for everyone. We apologize to those who have been inconvenienced," he added.
Facebook's map on Downdetector.com, which monitors disruptions, showed major outages over parts of North America.
Facebook did not disclose how many of the social network's more than one billion users were effected by the outage.
People took to Twitter during the outage, with #facebookdown jumping into a spot among the top trending hashtags at the one-to-many messaging service.
"People will have to ring their friends from restaurants to describe their starter; it's inhuman," said a quip from Twitter account @WillLeahy.
Another joking tweet predicted a baby boom, since spouses would have to resort to speaking to one another.
The social network's mobile app was also back in service, while its Messenger services were working during the outage.
Facebook suffered a similar outage on Thursday when it was down in North America, Europe, Australia and India.
Written with agency inputs
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