The social networking site Facebook suffered a period of short outages yesterday. A spokesman told the BBC that the outage was not thought to have affected every country, but Netcraft found the site to be unavailable from all of its performance collectors, located in London, Pennsylvania, San Jose, Phoenix, New York, Virginia and Italy.

Facebook’s popularity has continued to grow and is now the 33rd most visited site by users of the Netcraft toolbar. Originally called “The Facebook”, the company renamed itself after purchasing the domain facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000. By October 2007, Microsoft announced that it had bought a 1.6% share in Facebook for $246 million.