Seoul: Facebook suffered a widespread outage lasting roughly 40 minutes on Tuesday affecting users in the United States, Asia, the U.K. and Australia.
The social media giant's Instagram service was also briefly inaccessible.
A South Korea 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 in Asia, some users reported that the site was loading or responding slowly.
The temporary loss of service may be Facebook's biggest outage since Sept. 24, 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours.
