Instagram and Facebook Down, and Social Media Is Outraged

Instagram and Facebook users across the world experienced outage issues Wednesday morning, prompting many to wonder what was going on with the social media platforms. As documented by Down Detector, the reported amount of problems on Instagram shot up just before 11 a.m. ET Wednesday and extended into the early afternoon, while Facebook issues began just after 8 a.m. and continued into the rest of the day. While 81 percent of the most-reported Instagram problems had to do with the news feed, others reported issues with Stories and the web version of the social medium as well. Forty-one percent of reported Facebook problems were described as a “total blackout,” while 38 percent were newsfeed issues.

For Instagram, the highest concentration of outages occurred in New York City as well as several large cities in Europe, including Paris, France; Barcelona, Spain; and Madrid, Spain. Less concentrated outages were documented in cities like San Francisco, California; Dallas, Texas; Toronto, Ontario; London, England; and Rome, Italy.

For Facebook, its highest concentration of outages occurred in Washington, D.C.; Seattle, Washington; San Francisco, California; Chicago, Illinois; Toronto, Ontario; Warsaw, Poland and Amsterdam. Other less concentrated outages were documented across the United States and Europe.

Many frustrated users took to Twitter to complain about Instagram and Facebook being down, while others were hopeful the platforms were experiencing scheduled maintenance in order to introduce new features.

As is typically the case when Instagram or Facebook goes down, the outage inspired plenty of memes over on Twitter.

Many complained that this isn’t even the first time this month that Instagram specifically has been down, as many users had issues on Saturday, Oct. 12. Some users got a “failed to load” error message when they tried to open the mobile app or the desktop site in a browser. Repeatedly logging out and back in again didn’t help, either, leading many to believe that there was a problem on the web-hosting end.

It’s unclear how long Instagram and Facebook will be experiencing outage issues.