However, Instagram did not specify the number of people or the regions affected.

Users took to Twitter to complain about the outage, tweeting jokes and comments along with the #instagramdown hashtag.

"Hi five! If you come to twitter and checking if the Instragram is down," @kneelonyeahtea tweeted.

DownDetector.com, a website which monitors outages, showed that there were over 32,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Instagram at its peak but that figure quickly dropped to about 500 reports. Instagram had started having issues at 7:21 p.m. ET on Monday (0021 GMT Tuesday), according to the web site.

(Reporting by Shubham Kalia; additional reporting by Supriya Roy and Bhanu Pratap in Bengaluru; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Gopakumar Warrier)