Instagram is back online after the social network’s services went down worldwide this morning, just days after it appointed a new chief executive officer.

Millions of users were prevented from posting pictures of their breakfast and morning workout routines on Wednesday during the outage, which lasted for around an hour from 8am.

Cities including London, San Francisco and Singapore were affected by the incident, which left users with a “couldn’t refresh feed” message against a blank screen when they opened the app.

The app has an estimated one billion users worldwide, some of whom took to Twitter to alert others in comic fashion to the impact of the outage under the hashtag #Instagramdown.

The social media account of Queensland police force in Australia tweeted: “Instagram being down is not a police matter. You can post photos of food again soon enough #NoFilter #InstagramDown.”

The incident will make for an interesting first week for Adam Mosseri, a ten-year veteran of parent company Facebook, who was named as the company’s chief executive yesterday.

His promotion to the role was announced after the sudden departure of the app’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger last week.

Facebook is also reeling from a cyberattack last week which potentially left 90 million user accounts exposed worldwide.

The UK’s Information Commissioner (ICO) said it would be making enquiries with Facebook last week after the company announced on Friday that it had identified 50 million accounts involved in the breach and a further 40 million that could have been left exposed as a result of vulnerabilities in Facebook’s code.

Today, Ireland’s data protection office said it had announced an investigation into the breach, which could make use of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) to levy a fine of up to four per cent of the firm’s annual global turnover, equivalent to £1.25 billion.

It has not yet been established whether Facebook-linked user accounts on apps including Spotify, Air BnB and Tinder, which require Facebook login details, have been affected. Facebook has said it is working to identify the source and extent of the breach.

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