As you may already know if you are reading this, Instagram is offline. The feed of the app is frozen, giving users errors that cannot be refreshed, while the website only gives a blank page. In an email to The edge, Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold acknowledged the outage, saying, “We are aware that some people are having issues accessing Instagram. We are working to get everything back to normal as soon as possible and apologize for the inconvenience.”
According to the troubleshooter DownDetectorthe first reports of issues started a few minutes after 6pm ET before peaking at over 175,000 reports, with no sign of a fix yet.
At the moment, other services from Instagram’s parent company Meta, such as Facebook, WhatsApp or Horizon Worlds, appear to be unaffected. There are no signs of issues like the massive data center backbone issue that crippled the company’s services for hours in 2021, and usually these types of outages are resolved quickly.
Instagram’s help page and accounts on other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have not posted any updates on 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 21, 7:20 PM ET: Comment added from Meta spokesperson confirming the Instagram outage.
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