Instagram was down, but now it’s working again

For a couple of hours on Sunday evening, Instagram was down. The app’s feed froze, throwing user errors saying it couldn’t be updated, while the website just gave a blank page. According to the outage tracker DownDetector, the first problems started a few minutes after 6 p.m. ET before increasing to over 1[ads1]75,000 reports at its peak, but at 7:30 PM ET, the issue appears to have been resolved and it is working again.

In another email The VergeMeta spokesperson Dave Arnold acknowledged the outage, saying: “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. »

Other services belonging to Instagram’s parent company Meta, such as Facebook, WhatsApp or Horizon Worlds, appear to have been unaffected. There are no signs of problems like the massive data center backbone problem that took down the company’s services for hours in 2021.

Instagram’s help page and accounts on other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter had not posted any updates on the outage. An Instagram-owned service like Twitter would be a good place to check, but despite rumors and leaks, it doesn’t exist yet.

Update 21 May at 7:20 p.m. ET: Added a comment from the Meta spokesperson confirming the Instagram breach.

Update 21 May at 7:42 PM ET: Updated to note that the outage appears to be over.