Instagram's service returned Wednesday morning after an outage affected users across North America, Europe and elsewhere for several hours.
Reports on the website DownDetector indicated the site's service resumed across North America on Wednesday while showing outages across parts of Europe including the U.K., while other outages persisted in parts of Australia and Japan.
Users flocked to Twitter during the outage, where the hashtag "#InstagramDown" trended for hours.
"Instagram being down is not a police matter. You can post photos of food again soon enough #NoFilter #InstagramDown," one police department in Queensland, Australia tweeted early Wednesday.
Press representatives for Instagram did not immediately respond for a request for comment from The Hill on the outage's cause.
The outage comes just days after the company's two founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, announced their departure from the company last week amid reports of friction between them and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of parent company Facebook. The company named also named a new CEO.
“We are thrilled to hand over the reins to a product leader with a strong design background and a focus on craft and simplicity — as well as a deep understanding of the importance of community,” Systrom and Krieger said in a statement Monday.
Instagram is an important part of Facebook's company as the social platform's user base, which trends towards younger users than Facebook or Twitter, is still growing while other social media platforms have seen lagging user counts.
