Instagram Hit With Major Outage As Users Report Issues With Mobile App

Instagram appears to be suffering from a major outage that has left users in multiple countries unable to access new content through the platform's mobile app. Reports about the issues spiked on Down Detector at approximately 6 p.m. Eastern Time, climbing rapidly from a baseline of around 80 reports to nearly 200,000 in a little over an hour. The majority of users report issues involving the mobile app, though that's not surprising as Instagram is a largely mobile-based platform where desktop usage is far less popular. At the time of writing, fewer than 5% of reports indicated issues with logging into the platform.

Some users report being able to intermittently access the app and refresh content; in our own testing, we weren't able to load new content but were able to log in. It's unclear how broadly this disruption is impacting users, though the nature of the outage may change in the coming hours as parent company Meta steps in to address the matter. At this time, the Meta status website for business products shows "major disruptions" involving the ads manager and "some disruptions" involving the Graph API. Instagram Shops are listed as having "No known issues," while the Atlassian Status page for Instagram currently shows all systems as operational.

Because the outage is in its early stages, there isn't much information available at this time. Meta hasn't yet issued a comment on the reports, though based on Down Detector and complaints from users on Twitter, it's clear that something is going on with the company's product. The bulk of reports at the time of writing appears to come from the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom, though there are also reports from other major markets, including India. Neither the regular Instagram nor Instagram Communications accounts on Twitter have published comments on the disruption.

Down Detector

This certainly isn't the first time Meta has faced a large outage involving one or more of its products, and if history is any indication, it likely won't be too long before the company rolls out a solution for the problem. Whether users ever get an answer about what went down is another matter, though Meta will likely issue a blanket statement at some point informing users of a general timeline for a fix. At the time of writing, it appears that Facebook and other Meta products are working as expected, indicating the outage may be isolated to Instagram.