UPDATED, 2:40 p.m. ET: Thousands of Instagram users reported issues accessing the video and photo-sharing app Friday, with the bulk of the issues involving problems accessing the news feed. The problems extended beyond Instagram to other Facebook services, including WhatsApp.
According to Facebook, the problems were resolved after a brief disruption. “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Earlier, in a tweet at 1:54 p.m. ET, the Facebook Gaming account acknowledged “a number of issues currently affecting Facebook products, including gaming streams. Multiple teams are working on it, and we’ll update you when we can.”
The issues appeared to be largely rectified in under an hour. User reports of errors on Instagram spiked just after 1:30 p.m. ET, with more than 100,000 problems tabulated by DownDetector. The reports were concentrated on the East Coast of the U.S., with New York in particular representing a large source of the issues. During the same timeframe, there also were noticeable upticks in problems reported by Facebook and WhatsApp on the DownDetector website.
In addition to problems accessing the Instagram app, users reported seeing a “5xx Server Error” message when trying to access instagram.
Some people were having issues with their Instagram accounts earlier, but we're back now. The issue's been fixed and we're sorry for the trouble. #instagramdown pic.twitter/dd9mJPiqDz
— Instagram (@instagram) March 19, 2021
Instagram and the rest of Facebook’s family of apps have experienced sporadic outages and technical problems over the years. Last September, Instagram was down for about an hour stemming from what Facebook said was an errant network-configuration change.According to the social giant, Instagram has more than 1 billion monthly active users globally.
