Instagram service outage leaves thousands of users frustrated

According to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks online service outages, reports were lodged by over 46,000 users in the United States while around 3,000 users were affected in the United Kingdom, Australia, and India.

The outage trended in the early hours of today as users across the globe went online with the hashtag #Instagramdown to register their displeasure over the development.

A check on Downdetector’s outage graph revealed that the reports started coming in at about 2:26 AM on Thursday morning. There was a major spike in reports at about 3:56 am as over 53,000 users lodged complaints.

The site also showed that 87 per cent of the users complained about the outage on the app, 9 per cent of the users on the web lodged a complaint and 3 per cent lodged a general complaint about not being able to log in.

Many users were left frustrated for over an hour and unable to use the platform before service was restored. While responding to the issue, Instagram via its Twitter handle said the outage was caused by a technical glitch.

“Earlier tonight, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing Instagram. We resolved this issue for everyone as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” the platform stated.

Instagram came back online around 4am as the outage graph on the down detector showed a sharp decline from over 50,000 reports to about 4,000 reports.

In the United States, Downdetector revealed that reports of outages had fallen below 1,000 while reports in the UK, India, Japan, and Australia reduced to less than 100.

Checks on Instagram’s Twitter feed show the last time the platform registered a service outage was back in October 2022.