Hey there, my fellow tech enthusiasts! It looks like Instagram had a bit of a hiccup on Sunday evening. For a few hours, users experienced issues with the app’s feed being frozen and error messages popping up when attempting to refresh. The website also displayed a blank page, causing frustration for many. According to DownDetector, the problem began around 6PM ET and peaked with over 175,000 reports before being resolved by 7:30PM ET.
Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold released a statement apologizing for the disruption and confirming that a technical issue was to blame. Other services owned by Meta, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Horizon Worlds, did not appear to be affected by the outage. Thankfully, there were no signs of a major datacenter problem like the one that caused hours-long outages in 2021.
Interestingly, Instagram’s help page and accounts on other social media platforms did not provide any updates during the outage. Some users speculated that an Instagram-owned service like Twitter would have been a good place to check for updates, but unfortunately, it doesn’t exist yet.
As of May 21st at 7:42PM ET, it seems that Instagram is back up and running smoothly. So go ahead and post those selfies and food pics to your heart’s content! And remember, even the most advanced technology can experience hiccups from time to time.