Instagram users across the United States and the United kingdom are reportedly being hit with an error message when they open the application with some features seemingly not working on the popular photo-sharing app.

“Try again later- we limit how often you can do certain things on Instagram to protect our community” is the message that is greeting many users throughout the world.

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Some users say that stories are appearing blank while others are not able to do almost anything on their favourite pastime. The hashtag #instagramdown began trending on Twitter as users demanded a fix. 

The company is yet to confirm the outage. 

The outage was first experienced in New York and then in Los Angeles and Washington DC, the Independent reported. 

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As per  DownDetector, an online platform that provides users with real-time information about the status of various websites and services, the reports of outages began escalating about 4:10 PM EST on Monday and had risen to almost 6,000 within the hour. The United Kingdom had about 3,000 reports during roughly the same period, with outages mostly in London.

“I got heart attack I thought that Instagram banned my account #instagramdown,” a social media user wrote. 

“WHAT KIND OF PRANK IS THIS??” another one tweeted. 

Earlier this week, another social media platform, Snapchat, went down for thousands of users as they were unable to open the app on multiple platforms 

“We’re aware of an issue preventing some Snapchatters from logging in. Hang tight, we are looking into it and working on a fix!” the Snapchat team had said.