Instagram outage affected users accessing its website and mobile app

Instagram, the photo and video sharing social media platform owned by Facebook, experienced an outage Thursday affecting users in multiple countries. Visitors who tried accessing the Instagram homepage were greeted by an error message: "Sorry, something went wrong." The desktop site has since been restored.

CBS News tried accessing the Instagram app on the East Coast earlier Thursday, and the app rendered an error that read "couldn't refresh feed."

The company used Twitter around 6:40 p.m. ET to say it was aware of an issue affecting users' accounts and were working to remedy the issue. After 8 p.m. ET, the company again tweeted to say "we are now fully recovered."

Down Detector, a website that tracks global outages across social media platforms and websites, showed an apparent outage on the West and East coasts, which started around 5:30 p.m. ET. The site also showed outages in other spots across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

CNET has reached out to Instagram for comment and any additional details about cause of the outage. It doesn't appear any other Facebook-related services were impacted Thursday.

Earlier, an outage also hit the PlayStation Network, preventing users from accessing their accounts. The company acknowledged the snafu and thanked users "for your patience" while it investigated.