For a few hours on Sunday night, Instagram was down. The app feed froze, throwing users errors that it couldn’t update, while the website only gave a blank page. According to outage tracker DownDetector, the first reports of trouble started a few minutes after 6pm ET before spreading to more than 175,000 reports at its peak, but by 7:30pm ET the issue appears to have been fixed and it is working again. other.
in an email to the edgeMeta spokesperson Dave Arnold acknowledged the outage, saying, “We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Other services belonging to Instagram’s parent Meta, such as Facebook, WhatsApp or Horizon Worlds, appear to be unaffected. There’s no indication of any issues such as a massive data center backbone problem that shut down the company’s services for hours in 2021.
Instagram’s help page and accounts on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter have not posted any updates about the outage. An Instagram-owned service like Twitter might be a good place to check, but despite rumors and leaks, it doesn’t exist yet.
Update May 21, 7:20 PM ET: Added comment from a Meta spokesperson confirming the Instagram outage.
Update May 21, 7:42 PM ET: Updated to note that the power outage appears to be over.
