Instagram Back Up After Brief Outage That Prevented Thousands of Users From Accessing Service

Thousands of users of Meta's Instagram on Thursday reported issues with the photo-sharing application, according to Downdetector.com. Nearly 24,000 users of Instagram were impacted by 5 pm ET (2:30am IST on Friday), according to outage-tracking website Downdetector, which collates status reports from a number of sources in the United States. Reports on Downdetector fell over the next couple of hours, and the service appears to be operational.

"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We're working to get things back to normal and apologize for any inconvenience," a Meta spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

About 23,330 users reported that they were affected by the outage, according to Downdetector.

Earlier on Thursday, Twitter had a near three-hour outage that affected as many as 50,000 users at its peak, according to Downdetector.com.

Facebook's services are crucial for many businesses around the world, and Facebook accounts are also commonly used to log in to other websites.

The company's apps are used by billions of people monthly, meaning outages can touch a large portion of the world's population.

Late last year, Meta had a nearly six-hour-long outage which kept WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of reach for billions of users.

The outage last year prevented the company's 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, the largest ever tracked by web monitoring group Downdetector.

In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, had revealed that the outage was caused by "configuration changes" on routers that coordinate network traffic between data centres.

A few days later, services including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were inaccessible again due to a tweak of the company's systems. The outage took place days after the major outage that blocked access to users for over six hours. Facebook had attributed the trouble to a configuration change at its computing platform and said that it affected users of the social network and Instagram, Messenger and Workplace globally.

© Thomson Reuters 2022