Instagram Is Down As Twitter Cards Launch
It would appear to be a total coincidence that Instagram would announce new Twitter Cards the same day as their service is knocked out for a significant amount of time. The announcement was made by the official Instagram account on Twitter at approximately 12:19 PM central time on November 3, 2021, and according to Down Detector, Instagram issues started at right around 12:30.
Instagram shared at just after noon that users can now use Twitter Card previews for Instagram posts. This means that when you post an Instagram link on Twitter, a preview of said post will appear for all to see. So long as they're using the most updated version of the Twitter app, a preview for said Instagram post will appear.
Again, it's highly unlikely that the two releases are related, but Instagram is having some issues today for quite a few users. If one heads to the main Instagram home page, their news feed will likely not appear. Instead, they'll more than likely see the "Sorry, this page isn't available" note with the addition: "The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed. Go back to Instagram."
If one visits an individual home page on Instagram, they'll likely have more luck. This would indicated that Instagram is having issues with serving content in real time, but that cached content is sticking around as it should in a situation such as this.
It would also appear that Instagram direct messaging (DMs) are non-functional. This also seems to be true of Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. This is generally how this sort of thing happens – when one goes down, the rest go with it, as the whole bunch are part of the same company.
Almost exactly a month ago, Facebook and Instagram had a similar sort of outage. According to Meta on October 28, 2021, "the names of the apps that we build – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp – will remain the same." It is unlikely that a name change would result in a more reliable service, despite the umbrella company's changing mission. This does not bode well for the metaverse that Meta is aiming to deliver.