Did Bieber's posting of Selena's Oscar pic take down Instagram?

Instagram users have been reportedly experiencing slow loading of the service, and some have suspected that it could be because teen star posted a picture of his former girlfriend Selena Gomez, sparking rumours if the duo might get back together.

Bieber has about 14 million followers on the photo-sharing service and soon after he posted Gomez's Oscars party picture, his fans apparently went into a frenzy of rumours, which might have caused an outage-inducing traffic spike.

Although Instagram acknowledged the outage affecting some users, it didn't say if Bieber's post was the cause, Tech Crunch reports.

An Instagram spokesperson said that as much as they hope for a blissful reunion between two of America's sweethearts, they have no reason to believe that Bieber's recent Instagram post caused the site to slow down.