Is Instagram Down? Some Users Are Experiencing Outages

Another surge of Instagram issues rose up on Saturday, and users were not happy. The social media [...]

By Michael Hein

Another surge of Instagram issues rose up on Saturday, and users were not happy. The social media app has been having repeated problems with outages recently, and it happened all over again on Saturday. As usual, people migrated to other social media apps to discuss the problems.

On Saturday, the internet function tracking site Down Detector received spiking reports about Instagram outages around the world. The problems flared up in the early morning, and continued to rise into the afternoon. At the time of this writing, there are 47 unresolved reports on the site.

Users commented on Down Detector to explain their issues as well. Many noted that they 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 did not help, leading many to believe that there was a problem on the web-hosting end.

Some users even said that they had never fully regained Instagram functionality since Thursday, when widespread outages panicked social media. Users flocked to Twitter, looking for details, or at least solidarity in this time of online crisis.

"[Instagram] you are crashing on iOS! WHY???" one fan tweeted. "What do we do?"

"Same here," added another. The users rallied around the hashtag "Instagram down."

Instagram's official channels did not comment on Saturday's issues, which did not seem to be universal among all users. Down Detector's live outage map showed hot spots of issues all over the globe, concentrated in high-population areas like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. There were other outages around Europe, Asia and South America, with just a few in Australia and Africa.

These days, outages on social media apps are a routine occurrence, particularly the larger and more popular ones. Instagram issues tend to go hand-in-hand with problems at Facebook, the app's parent company, as the two handle a huge amount of Internet traffic.

However, users have seen periodic problems with Twitter, WhatsApp and other online services in the last year, showing that out internet may not be as reliable as we sometimes assume.

When outages occur, some users often assume that it relates to updates and rollouts of new features, though this is not always the case. Instagram, for example, added a "dark mode" just this month, blacking out the background of the feed to make it easier on the eyes at night. This is available only with the iOS 13 operating system.

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