Meta Platforms Inc's image-sharing platform Instagram was down for thousands of users on Thursday, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.

More than 6,000 users reported issues with Instagram on Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage may be affecting a larger number of users.

According to the website, 84 per cent of reports flagged trouble with accessing the Instagram mobile application.

Meta Platforms said it was working on the issues. “We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram,” Meta said in a statement.

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

Major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were hit by a massive outage in October last year, impacting hundreds of millions of people.

In an apologetic blog post, the vice president of infrastructure at Meta, then known as Facebook, Santosh Janar­dhan, said that “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication”.

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