If your social media life went for a spin because your favourite Instagram wasn’t working and you couldn’t get the pleasure of endless scrolling, you are not alone. Instagram confirmed that the photo-sharing social media platform suffered a “brief outage” that lasted for a few hours and disrupted the service to thousands of users across the globe.
Since then however, Instagram is back online after the technical issue that was responsible for the nearly-two-hour-long outage was resolved by the social media company.
“Instagram is back! Sorry for the trouble – we had a brief outage earlier and resolved the issue that caused it. #instagramdown,” read a tweet by Instagram’s PR team on Twitter.
Instagram is back! Sorry for the trouble – we had a brief outage earlier and resolved the issue that caused it. #instagramdown
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) May 22, 2023
Coming back to the outage, the disruption of the service resulted in the app feed freezing up for several users, while the website showed a blank page. Refreshing the feed solved nothing except show errors that it could not do so. And unsurprisingly, the outage resulted in an inflow of memes and hilarious posts on Twitter as users (as usual) took to the micro-blogging site to air their grievances.
me leaving instagram when i see “couldn’t refresh feed” #InstagramDown pic.twitter.com/10O0kZeyro
— cameron (@cambeserious) May 21, 2023
everybody coming to twitter when instagram is down pic.twitter.com/pNkZkkeJSt
— kira 👾 (@kirawontmiss) May 21, 2023
Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from various sources, revealed that over 180,000 users reported issues with accessing the photo-sharing social media platform at the peak of the outage. More than 24,000 users in Canada and over 100,000 incidents in the US reported problems with Instagram, while the same number amounted to over 56,000 users in Britain. Over 9,500 instances of the outage were reported in India.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Instagram. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused,” a spokesperson for Meta commented on the matter in an email.
The outage at Instagram marks the first major one suffered by it since September 22. As a rule, the Meta-owned platform seldom goes down (and rarely in such a manner), and this time, Instagram did not elaborate on the technical issue that caused the outage. Downdetector reveals that 42% of users reported problems with connecting to the servers, while 41% of users ran into problems with the Instagram app. 16% of users reported issues while logging in.
