Instagram has stopped working, with people unable to see people’s pictures or profiles.

Users are instead greeted with empty profiles and a message that the app “cannot refresh feed”.

The web version of the app also has problems. Heading to any page brings up only a “5xx Server Error”.

The problems come amid a difficult time for Instagram. The company’s two founders left in recent days amid rumours that it disagreed with Facebook over how the company should be run.

And after the Facebook hack was revealed over the weekend, it emerged that Instagram users and accounts might also have been caught up in it if they had used their Facebook log-in to create their Instagram account.

It’s not thought that those issues have anything to do with the current outage, which is almost certainly simply a technical fault. Instagram goes down for time-to-time and can send major ripples across the internet, since more than a billion people use it each month.