Downdetector.com, a site that monitors social media sites for user-reported outage claims, registered more than 50,000 outage reports for Instagram within just a few minutes on Friday morning.

The outage apparently was first reported about 2.30pm Pacific Time on Thursday, or about 7.30am AEST on Friday.

Instagram confirmed just before 9am AEST that it was "working quickly to fix the issue".

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

The hashtag #instagramdown quickly started trending on Twitter as the outage continued.

It came a few hours after a widespread disruption of the Playstation Network.

Users were unable to log into their PSN, although services were up and running shortly after the issues were addressed.

 - With AAP