Instagram went down tonight, with thousands of social media users unable to log in to the photo-sharing website.

People worldwide reported problems with the Facebook-owned platform in an outage which lasted for around an hour.

Attempts to log in on a desktop browser are producing a blank page with the message: '5xx Server Error'.

On the mobile app users are being told that their feed cannot be refreshed.

Tweets posted by frustrated users suggested the Instagram outage stretched across the globe with the app not working here in NZ, Australia, the UK, United States or Singapore.

The website DownDetector said the problems had begun at 8.16pm.

People commenting on the website's updates also reported problems in California, Indonesia, India and Romania.