On Sunday evening, Instagram was offline for a few hours. The app’s feed was frozen and users were presented with an error message saying it couldn’t be refreshed, while the website just showed a blank page. According to outage tracker DownDetector, the first reports of problems began a few minutes after 6:00 p.m. ET before peaking at over 175,000 reports, but by 7:30 p.m. ET the problem appeared to be resolved and it was working again.
In an email to The Verge, meta spokesman Dave Arnold confirmed the outage, saying: “We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We are working to get things back to normal as soon as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Other services of the Instagram parent company Meta such as Facebook, WhatsApp or Horizon Worlds do not appear to be affected. There are no signs of problems like the massive data center backbone problem that crippled the company’s services for hours in 2021.
No updates on the outage were posted on Instagram’s help page or accounts on other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. An Instagram-owned service like Twitter would be a good place to start, but despite the rumors and leaks, it doesn’t exist yet.
Update from May 21st 7:20pm ET: Added a meta speaker’s comment confirming the Instagram outage.
Update from May 21st 7:42pm ET: Updated to note that the outage appears to be over.