Instagram down: App not working, users say, as people complain about being unable to share Thanksgiving photos

Instagram is down, according to some of its users.

A huge number of people rushed to complain that the photo sharing website had broken.

The outage comes on Thanksgiving morning in the US, leading many to joke that they had been forced to engage with their family members.

The problems are being seen across the world, according to tracking website Down Detector.

But it does not appear to be affecting all users, with some accounts able to load as normal. Others suggested that only certain parts of the app, such as viewing someone's profile, is broken.

Problems were also reported at Facebook, which owns Instagram. Users reported they were unable to get online on that site, too.

WhatsApp, which is the other major part of Facebook's empire of social networks, did not appear to be affected by the outage.

All three apps are thought to share much of the same underlying infrastructure, which means that problems on one of the services are usually echoed by problems at the other two.

This summer, all three of the apps went down for almost a day, causing problems across the internet and likely costing the company vast sums of money.

Facebook plans to merge the three platforms so that they have one shared back-end, Mark Zuckerberg has said, which will presumably mean that the apps are even more likely to go down together.