More than 180,000 users reported issues with accessing Instagram at the peak of the outage, with over 24,000 users in Canada and over 56,000 users in Britain reporting problems.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.

Meta – the company that owns Instagram – issued a statement apologising for the inconvenience.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram,” a Meta spokesperson said.

“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

-AAP