Culture

Instagram is down and people are freaking out

Photos and videos are wiped from user feeds while accessing personal settings yields zero results.

Woman sitting in cafe and viewing someone's photo on mobile phone.
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On Friday afternoon, Instagram users noticed that the Facebook-owned app was down. For some users, photos and videos had disappeared from their own feeds. Stories appeared to be inaccessible while any attempts to open personal settings, including changing your own profile picture, yielded no results.

When users attempted to access their own personal profiles, many were led to empty pages. I personally checked my old account and noticed that none of my photos or videos were available for viewing. Instead, I was given this blank slate as if I was a brand new user. Counts for followers as well as the people I follow were wiped from the page layout. Attached below are some photos of the app not working.

Instagram

Background for the outage — DownDetector, which tracks shutdowns or unexpected crashes for websites and apps, notes that the Instagram outage began around 10:00 a.m. PT. According to the tracker's count, 123,853 Instagram users had been affected by the sudden loss of service.

Additionally, 70 percent reported that their news feed had been disrupted, finding nothing to view. At least 17 percent reported that they had received an 5xx Error, which is an error that is created by the server itself. An 5xx Error normally happens when the server is crowded beyond capacity. Another explanation for an 5xx Error is when there's a problem executing and resolving HTML entries. About 12 percent of Instagram users noted that they could not log into their apps.

It appears that the outage took place globally, affecting Instagram users in the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Germany, Japan, Turkey, Denmark, South Africa, and beyond.

No settings for you — If you try to open your settings to edit your Instagram profile, the outage will not allow for users to go any further. Any attempts to refresh the page, with the prompt on the top right, will produce no results. Changing your profile photo is, at least right now, impossible.

Instagram

Neither Instagram's official Twitter account nor its communications team have offered an explanation. In all likelihood, this seems to be a congestion error which will resolve soon. Your brunch photo can wait.