Instagram down for users for a few hours worldwide, cause unclear

Users complained about difficulties logging in, uploading photos, and accessing Instagram features

Meta-owned social networking service Instagram reportedly suffered an outage Thursday morning affecting several users globally, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

At its peak, over 42,000 incidents of disruption were reported by users of the social media platform on Downdetector.com. According to the outage tracking website, over 2,000 users were affected in the UK, while it received over 1,000 reports from India.

While the cause of the disruption of services on Instagram is unclear, the outage lasted for a few hours impacting several users as the social media platform was out of order. Users complained about difficulties logging in, uploading photos, and accessing features of the social media platform.

The outage sparked a meme contest on the micro-blogging website Twitter. A user tweeted, “Instagram is down(,) for a second I thought my account was deleted.”

This is not the first time users have faced issues with the platform. In October 2022, several users across the globe had problems accessing their Instagram accounts, while some noticed an abnormal change in the number of followers. Instagram confirmed the issue while assuring that the bug had been resolved. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, had then taken to Twitter to apologise for the outage. Earlier this year, in February, multiple Instagram users faced difficulties accessing the platform due to a technical issue.

Downdetector.com, which tracked the outage, collects data about issues associated with digital platforms and monitors the volume of problems reported on the website to evaluate the status of an issue. Moreover, it presents a live outage heatmap of problem reports to the users visiting its website. Users can submit problem reports on the website's company status page while indicating the type of problem that they are facing.