Instagram Down Again: Users Worldwide Experienced Hours-Long Access Problems

Instagram Down Again: Users Worldwide Experienced Hours-Long Access Problems

Technical glitch also preventing some Facebook and WhatsApp users from sharing photos, videos

UPDATED: Instagram users across the globe reported problems sharing to and accessing the Facebook-owned photo and video service on mobile apps and the web on Wednesday — an outage that continued for much of the day.

Instagram began having issues since 8:45 a.m. ET, with most of the user reports concentrated in the Northeast U.S. and Western Europe, according to DownDetector.com.

Users of Facebook and WhatsApp were also encountering problems sharing photos, video and files, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed.

In a statement sent just before 4 p.m. ET, a Facebook rep said, “During one of our routine maintenance operations, we triggered an issue that is making it difficult for some people to upload or send photos and videos. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

At about 8 p.m. ET, Facebook said “The issue has since been resolved and we should be back at 100% for everyone.”

For many Instagram users, most images and videos were failing to load in the app on Wednesday, July 3. On desktop, Instagram also was not loading images or videos, accompanied by a message that said “No photo description available” or messages with metadata tags like “Image may contain: food.” Some said when they tried to post photos, Instagram only displayed the caption and not the image, while other users reported an inability to access the service at all.

Predictably, many disgruntled Instagram users took to Twitter to vent their frustration, and the hashtag #instagramdown became the top-trending topic on Twitter on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Meanwhile, Twitter was having its own problems, related to its direct-messaging feature. “We’re currently having some issues with DM delivery and notifications. We’re working on a fix and will follow up as soon as we have an update for you,” Twitter’s support team tweeted.

Instagram acknowledged the access problems in a tweet at 12:15 p.m. ET, apologizing for the outage. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images and videos on Instagram,” the tweet said. “We’re sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #instagramdown.”

We’re aware that some people are having trouble uploading or sending images and videos on Instagram. We’re sorry for the trouble and are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. #instagramdown

— Instagram (@instagram) July 3, 2019

The latest problems come three weeks after Instagram had an outage that lasted more than two hours, on June 13. In that case, some users reported that they couldn’t access Instagram at all, while others couldn’t conduct searches or access other parts of the service. Instagram’s website also in some cases displayed a “5xx server error” message. That came after two other previously reported major outages in June.

Instagram’s technical issues come a day after an outage at Cloudflare, a content-delivery and security services provider, caused multiple websites and services to be inaccessible Tuesday, including OKCupid, Peloton, Feedly, Discord and (ironically) DownDetector. Cloudflare said the outage was caused by “a bad software deploy.”