A massive technical glitch hit Instagram, with thousands of users reporting problems sending messages and viewing their direct messages (DMs), according to the service outage monitor Downdetector. Issues began at about 5:14 p.m. on Tuesday.
Over 2,000 reports have been logged so far, which indicates that the Meta-owned photo-sharing service is significantly impaired. People are taking to other sites, such as X, formerly known as Twitter, to complain about it and see if anyone else is experiencing the same problem.
One user complained on X: “Ignored your DM? No, I didn’t!! Instagram is down!! ” Another said, “Is it me, or is everyone else not able to send DMs on Instagram?” The third user said, “Messages aren’t delivering and show ‘failed to deliver’ after a few minutes. Is anyone else experiencing this?”
It would appear that the outage is still in place, and there has not been any official statement from Instagram or its parent company, Meta, concerning the cause of these technical malfunctions.
Users are encouraged to check the Instagram status page and Downdetector for updates. Meanwhile, most users have resolved to find other social media means of keeping in touch.
The platform has not gone through troubles for the first time. Facebook and Instagram went down on October 15 in an outage that had left thousands affected across the U.S. Over 12,000 incidents were reported for Facebook during the peak of the problem, while over 5,000 issues were logged for Instagram.
This was after hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users were down for over two hours earlier this year due to technical issues. At the time, Downdetector recorded over 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram.
