Facebook is down.

The social network, with its 550 million worldwide users, said it is "currently experiencing some site issues causing Facebook to be slow or unavailable for some users."

"We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible," according to a spokesperson.

Facebook has not seen many widespread outages in recent years. There was a brief outage earlier this year, as well as some issues earlier this week.

The problems come at a somewhat inopportune time for the company, which is also dealing with the imminent release of "The Social Network," a movie that portrays founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a questionable (if fictionalized) light.

The Times wrote about the film and the company today.

Updated 2:14 p.m.: The site appears to be coming back up for some users.

Updated 2:44 p.m.: The site is back up. A Facebook official said the outage was not the result of an attack.

Facebook's statement: "Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of users. The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

-- David Sarno