Photo sharing social media platform Instagram stopped working for an hour this morning (3rd October), sending many users into a panic.

Instead of a steady feed of content, users were instead being greet with empty profiles and a message that read “cannot refresh feed”. Similarly, the web version of the app also had problems, with attempts to access any page bringing up a “5xx Server Error”.

The outage appears to have lasted for just an hour but it caused huge ripples across the internet, which is understandable considering it has more than a billion active users each month.

According to online outage-tracking website, Down Detector, users in northern Europe, Australia, Japan, India and the west coast of the US in particular, were affected by the issues. Affected users took to Twitter to complain about the outage and to verify the news. Users affected by the Instagram outage flooded competitor platform Twitter with memes and jokes about the incident.

Instagram Outage Comes One Day After New Boss Appointed

At present, the Facebook-owned platform has yet to provide an explanation for the cause of the outage. However, this malfunction comes at a difficult time for Instagram as the company’s two founders recently departed the company amid rumours that they disagreed with Facebook over how the company should operate. It also comes one day after Adam Mosseri, a Facebook executive, was named as the new Instagram chief executive.

This outage could be related to the massive Facebook hack, which took place last week. Facebook revealed that 50 million of its accounts had been compromised by hackers, who had obtained those accounts’ access tokens. Facebook said there was also a risk that third-party apps linked to those accounts could have been compromised. This would include any Facebook accounts linked to Instagram or if the user had set up their Instagram account using their Facebook login.

At this time, it is not thought that those issues are related to the current outage as Instagram goes down from time-to-time. While other areas have come back online, some UK users appear to remain unable to access Instagram’s content.