Instagram down: Outage disrupts services in US for over 16,000 users, brief hiccup reported in India

An outage that disrupted Instagram services for thousands of users across the United States on Wednesday has largely subsided, according to the outage-tracking platform Downdetector.

The issue, which began earlier in the day, saw a significant drop in the number of users affected by midday. As of 12:10 p.m. ET, the number of reported incidents had fallen to 849, a sharp decline from the peak of 16,747 reports logged on the platform.

Here’s what the outage tracking data suggests

Downdetector, which gathers user-submitted reports to track real-time service interruptions, indicated that the majority of complaints, around 67 per cent were related to the app not functioning properly. Another 26 per cent of users reported issues with the feed, while six per cent experienced difficulties logging into their accounts.

It is worth mentioning that some Instagram users in India also experienced issues during the outage, as reflected on Downdetector. At around 9:05 PM IST, over 550 users in the country reported problems with the platform. However, by approximately 10:50 PM IST, the number of reports had dropped to just 28, indicating that the disruption had been resolved and services had resumed normal operations.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram, has not yet issued an official statement regarding the cause of the disruption or the steps taken to resolve it.

The platform has experienced outages in the past, often drawing widespread attention from users dependent on it for communication and content sharing.

Soon, social media was flooded with memes where users expressed their frustration with the outage.

“Me running to twitter to see if Instagram is down for anyone else,” wroteDominickmuellerrr, an X user.

Expressing confusion of the sudden outage, another X user by the handle @DannyThePlug wrote, “I was in people instagram pages thinking they blocked me but whole time instagram was down😭😭.”