Instagram was back up online this morning after hours of outages around the world, the social media site has reported.

Down Detector, a website that tracks outages, reported 56,628 reports at around 11 pm on Sunday (May 21).

The Down Detector location map showed the outages spread across the UK with reports of outages coming from the US and Australia as well.

Instagram said at 1.19 am on Monday (May 22) that the issue which had caused the outage had been resolved.

In a tweet posted earlier this morning, Instagram wrote: "Instagram is back! Sorry for the trouble - we had a brief outage earlier and resolved the issue that caused it. #instagramdown."

What was affected by the Instagram outages?

The photo and video networking service appeared to be online again before 1am with reports of the outages dropping to less than 500 by around that time.

According to Down Detector, 92% of the outages were on the app and 6% was via the website.

Meanwhile, there was a further 2% on the login.

Users could not refresh their feeds or post during the outages.

It came after Instagram experienced an outage on March 9 where thousands of users reported similar issues.