On Sunday night, Instagram was down for a few hours. The app’s feed was frozen, giving users errors saying it couldn’t be refreshed, while the website only gave a blank page. According to the outage tracker DownDetector, the first reports of issues started a few minutes after 6pm ET before reaching over 175,000 at peak, but by 7:30pm ET, the issue appears to be resolved and working again.
In an email to The edgeMeta 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.”
Other services of Instagram’s parent company Meta, such as Facebook, WhatsApp or Horizon Worlds, seem to have remained unaffected. There are no signs of issues like the massive data center backbone problem that crippled the company’s services for hours in 2021.
Instagram’s help page and accounts on other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter had not 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 21, 7:20 PM ET: Comment added from Meta spokesperson confirming the Instagram outage.
Update May 21, 7:42 PM ET: Updated to note that the outage appears to be over.