Ben Margot / AP
This Tuesday, July 16, 2013, file photo shows a sign at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015 | 12:10 a.m.
SEOUL, South Korea — Facebook suffered a widespread outage lasting roughly 40 minutes on Tuesday affecting users worldwide.
The glitch reported in Asia, the United States, Australia and the U.K. affected access from PCs and Facebook's mobile app. The social media giant's Instagram service was also briefly inaccessible.
A South Korean public relations company that represents Facebook said the company was "working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible." It did not explain what caused the outage.
Facebook has about 1.25 billion users and Instagram has some 300 million.
News of the Facebook outage set rival social network Twitter alight. It comes ahead of Facebook reporting its quarterly earnings on Wednesday.
As access to Facebook returned, some users in Asia reported that the site was loading slowly or not offering full functionality.
The temporary loss of service may be Facebook's biggest outage since Sept. 24, 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours.
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