After a two-hour outage yesterday, Thursday, September 22, which affected thousands of Android and iOS users’ logging activities on the meta-owned social media platform, Instagram said that it was back online.
Based on a report by IANS, there was an outage on this social media platform which logged out a number of users and it faced a technical glitch where almost 34,000 users reported having trouble accessing their Instagram profile.
What happened during the outage of the media sharing platform?
As the social media platform that is used to share photos and videos shut down for two hours on Thursday, the users were unable to post, share or refresh their Instagram feed or send DMs. The users faced the same issue for several hours and took it up on Twitter with the hashtag #instagramdown which started trending in a few hours. While some users only encountered a lag on the Instagram app, others could not access the service at all. Additionally, some Instagram users were unable to open Instagram Stories, receive or send direct messages or load new posts on their feeds.
What was Instagram's statement?
Instagram, via a tweet, conveyed that there has been a technical issue and posted an apology that said, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience, and hang tight!”
The Instagram outage began around 9:15 pm (IST) and greatly impacted users in the US, South America, Asia and Europe.
An hour after the apology tweet, Instagram tweeted again and said the issue has been resolved, “And we’re back! We resolved the issue that caused today’s outage, and apologize for any inconvenience.”
How have people responded to this?
The users took it up on Twitter to create memes and posts about the Instagram outage and the #instragramdown hashtag started trending in a few hours.
"I cannot log into my account; please help," a user tweeted, as reported by IANS.
"I still can't log in. Instagram kicked me out 10 hours ago and since then, I always get the message that I should try it later again," another user wrote.
According to https://downdetector.in/, the number of users of this social media platform who reported an issue was at its peak at around 10:24 pm (IST) on September 22. About 33,000 issues were reported. (Source: downdetector)
What about previous instances when Instagram was shut down?
On October 5, 2021, there was a worldwide shutdown of Facebook and Instagram for six hours reportedly and users could not access their social media profiles. Even the messenger WhatsApp shut down. All the platforms owned by Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, lost nearly $ 7 billion in a matter of few hours which pushed him down to the fifth spot in the global billionaire list after the stock market of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp plunged.
What is Instagram?
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service founded in 2010. Instagram allows users to edit and upload photos and short videos through a mobile app. Users can add a caption to each of their posts, use hashtags and location-based geotags to index these posts and make them searchable by other users within the app.
