In the past, Instagram has experienced a heap of blackouts and crashes that have resulted in users scratching their heads and wondering exactly what happened. Now, the feeling is certainly no different in the present day, with users across the globe being greeted with error messages today.
During prior crashes, the social platform has received worldwide outage for either just one hour or for multiple hours at a time. At the time of this writing, a global report was highlighted, suggesting that over 71% of Instagram users worldwide have had trouble loading the app today, as reported by Down Detector. Additionally, social media users have jumped over to X (formerly known as Twitter) to complain about being logged out of their profiles and given an error message, as many social users have done during prior outages. Folks have definitely become perplexed and irritated by the outage, leading them to turn their attention towards Meta, the parent company that controls both Instagram and Facebook. As it stands, Facebook is also down, with a large portion of users reporting outages on the social platform and being unable to access the app.
On top of lagging refreshed feeds, users reported an inability to upload posts, load direct message channels, or access the site via their computers. In any case, the outage is one of many to occur in recent years, with Instagram experiencing a similar en masse bug lasting several hours in September of 2022, March 2023, May 2023, March 2024, and now today. With this in mind, we’re taking the guesswork out of outages with some tips around how to identify when Instagram is down.
How to check Instagram servers
When the outage arises on Instagram’s end, an efficient way to confirm this is by visiting the platform’s in-app Help Page. Here, the Known Issues tab of the page should identify whether the app is crashing, as well as a host of other issues you might have recently experienced while on Instagram. While the Known Issues section might not confirm whether every other Instagram user is also experiencing an outage, it can point you in the direction of your specific predicament and also includes an Error Message section in the event that you encounter that bug during an outage.
Check independent status-checking sites
Ironically, accessing Instagram’s Help Page might be impossible during an outage, so your next port of call should be perusing independent status-checking sites. These are reliable resources that give you a clear indication as to whether the problem lies in your own device or with Instagram itself. Users use these sites to report issues around Instagram’s functionality in recent days, with additional areas for specific problems like uploading posts or accessing direct messages.
Is It Down Or Just Me, Is It Down Right Now, and Down Detector are perhaps the most popular of these sites, with the latter including a comments section where users can cite their issues. Down Detector also features a rating option and quick links to access complaint sections for Instagram as well as Twitter and Facebook.
Check your own app
If reports on a status-checking site are minimal, it might be the case that an outage is due to a problem on your end. Usually, a surefire way to rectify this is to check whether you have the latest version of the app. Android users can do this by checking the Update status of Instagram on Google Play, while iPhone owners can do the same via the App Store. Both users simply need to click update if there’s a new version of Instagram to be installed.
If all else fails, users can also do what is the Instagram equivalent of “turning it off and on again” by uninstalling and then re-downloading the app. In any case, users can rest assured that there’s plenty of platforms to access in the event of an Instagram outage, though the dumpster fire that is Elon Musk’s X-sphere remains perhaps the last option.
