The Instagram app took a break for over an hour on Sunday evening, but now it’s back online.
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For a couple of hours on Sunday evening, Instagram was down. The app’s feed was frozen, tossing users errors saying it couldn’t refresh, while the website only gave a blank page.
According to the outage tracker DownDetector, the first reports of trouble started a few minutes after 6PM ET before spiking to over 175,000 reports at its peak, but by 7:30PM ET, the issue had been resolved, and it’s working again.
In an email to The Verge after the outage, Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold said, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Instagram. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused.”
Given the timing, the outage quickly surfaced as a part of Monday morning news reports in Australia.
Other services belonging to Instagram’s parent company, Meta, like Facebook, WhatsApp, or Horizon Worlds, appear unaffected. There’s no sign of issues like the massive datacenter backbone problem that took down the company’s services for hours in 2021.
Instagram’s help page and accounts on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter hadn’t posted any updates about the outage. An Instagram-owned service like Twitter would be a good place to check, but despite the rumors and leaks, it doesn’t exist yet.
Update May 21st, 7:20PM ET: Added comment from Meta spokesperson confirming the Instagram outage.
Update May 21st, 7:42PM ET: Updated to note the outage appears to be over.
Update May 21st, 8:59PM ET: Added statement from Meta and tweet from Instagram Comms.
