HIGHLIGHTS
* Instagram is currently down for thousands of users globally.
* Downdetector shows a massive spike in the number of problems users have reported lately.
* Some users, who rely upon VPNs, are still able to access the platform.
Meta Platform’s (META.O) was back up for most users after a global outage, the photo-sharing platform said on Thursday, adding that an hours-long technical issue has been resolved.
“Earlier tonight, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing Instagram. We resolved this issue for everyone as quickly as possible,” Instagram said in a tweet.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, reported more than 53,000 incidents of users unable to access Instagram at the peak of the outage. The website collates status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.
As Instagram was coming back online, Downdetector said reports of outages had fallen below 1,000 in the United States.
Reports of issues came down to less than 100 reports in the UK, India, Japan and Australia, the outage-tracking website showed.
What we Know about the Instagram Global Outage
What has Happened
With features such as e-commerce, reels, personal blogging, news sharing and more, Instagram today is a one-stop destination for all kinds of information, entertainment and data.
Any glitch or even a moment’s disturbance can have huge effects on an unfathomably large audience.
On 31 October, the app faced a major global outage as users shared screenshots of the app crashing.
Soon Twitter was flooded with screenshots of people being locked out and their accounts suspended for violating certain community rules.
The notification comes with the warning that the user has 30 days time to disagree with the decision and if Instagram is unable to confirm their identity, the account will get permanently disabled.
Out of those affected, many reportedly have private accounts and did not post anything derogatory that would violate any rules. Media reports also suggest that this issue is mainly concentrated among iPhone users who were unable to use the app after installing an update in the morning.
What has Instagram Said
Instagram has acknowledged this issue and has responded to it with a tweet which reads, “We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience.” Following this #instagramdown started trending as well.
Dip in followers
Following this outage, several noted instagram followers have seen a major fall in followers count.
One of the highest-followed accounts belonging to ace footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has reportedly lost 3 million followers while Instagram’s own primary account has lost over a million followers.
Instagram Down for Thousands of Users, but there’s a way to access it
As seen in the Downdetector chart above, the app has witnessed a massive outage in the last 24 hours, and the issue seems to have not been fixed yet.
We tried to access the app via our metered connection, home Wi-Fi connection, and via a VPN (SurfShark).
While the first two methods did not help us a single bit, trying to access Instagram with a VPN connection on did work for us, thereby meaning that the issue might be specific to some locations and servers.
The outage has been causing Instagram to not load content, such as posts from the feed and even the Stories won’t load. Users have been seeing messages like “Couldn’t refresh feed” and “Couldn’t load posts”.
There have also been reports by users, claiming that Instagram gives out a notification suggesting that the devices are not connected to the internet, while they actually are.
Surprisingly, in our test, one of our devices even logged us out of the app, and we have to log in again (which, thankfully, worked).
Several Twitter users expressed their reactions with the #Instagramdown (the hashtag was even trending on Twitter earlier this morning). Here are some of them:
Instagram is yet to confirm this massive outage, and we hope that things get back on track as soon as possible.
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