If you, like me, roll over and immediately check your phone first thing when you wake up, then you probably noticed Instagram was down. RIP my morning scroll that I needed to be able to physically open my eyes long enough to get out of bed. I need blue light to burn the sleepiness out of my eyes!!
While Instagram released a statement confirming some people were experiencing an outage, complaints online indicate heaps of users experienced it — Downdetector received 175,383 reports of an outage in the last 24 hours, and this writer can confirm they experienced one themselves.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram,” a Meta spokesperson said, per news.com.au.
“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience
Instagram is currently down worldwide. pic.twitter.com/hXc6yTeDmH
— Pop Tingz (@ThePopTingz) May 21, 2023
It appears that if you tried to refresh the homepage, you would get a connection error that says “Couldn’t refresh feed”. The same goes for trying to refresh messages — an error notification that says “We’re sorry, but something went wrong. Please try again” would pop up.
It appears some stories would still load (for me, it was three out of hundreds), but for the most part the outage affected the entire app.
Honestly, I just thought my wifi and/or data weren’t working, which also seems to be a common occurrence. Australian internet, amirite?
Me apologizing to my wifi after finding out Instagram is down #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/DVrpJPiSz0
— dan (@repshours) May 21, 2023
Of course, folks were quick to take to Twitter instead of the photo app, because what do we do in times of crisis? We make memes.
Everyone running to Twitter cuz their INSTAGRAM IS DOWN! pic.twitter.com/kUI4ZHFR1R
— INSTAGRAM DOWN (@instagramdownnn) May 21, 2023
https://twitter.com/librv_/status/1660422349642973186?s=20
everybody coming to twitter when instagram is down pic.twitter.com/pNkZkkeJSt
— kira 👾 (@kirawontmiss) May 21, 2023
https://twitter.com/FcbxSam/status/1660421597323460608?s=20
Me finding out insta is down after switching my Wi-Fi and data on and off for the 50th time #instagramdown #instagram pic.twitter.com/PwS9vgJ6sv
— . (@7bling_bling) May 21, 2023
Me coming over to Twitter every time instagram down to make sure everybody else instagram down & it’s not just mine pic.twitter.com/5zhKhjcjmg
— HIM. (@1of1rjay) May 21, 2023
I just know the fact that the app went down in peak user times was probably catastrophic for some people’s daily commute stalk of their exes.
What are we supposed to do while packed in our trains like sardines? There’s not enough elbow room to read a book!
The outage was fixed around 9.30am — I kept checking my phone like it was a fridge with subpar snacks. I was hungry for something specific, damn it!
However, Instagram is yet to release a statement explaining why the outage happened. Weird, but I’m sure we’ll hear from them soon!
