Facebook says glitch shuttered Catholic Facebook pages

MENLO PARK, California — Facebook is blaming a technical glitch for knocking several Catholic-focused Facebook pages with millions of followers offline for more than a day.

Catholic radio station Relevant Radio reported that its page "Father Rocky" stopped appearing on Monday and did not resurface until Tuesday night. More than 20 other pages dedicated to Catholic subjects were also useless, he added.

The problem raised doubts among some of the organizers of those pages that they were being censored.

Facebook apologized for the inconvenience and told the Associated Press that the problem had been resolved. Facebook said the incident was "accidentally triggered by a spam filter."