Instagram is back online.
The popular social media platform is now accessible after a brief hours-long outage that prevented everyone worldwide from using the app and its many features.
Though most people can now access the app again, Meta has yet to address what happened and reveal why the outage happened.
Instagram March 2023 Outage Details
While the exact time the app went dark is hard to tell, popular global monitoring service DownDetector reports that the earliest report about the outage came in at around 5 PM PST. Since then, the number of reports constantly and significantly went up per XDA Developers.
CNN mentioned that Downdector received more than 53,000 incidents of user reports complaining about them being unable to access Instagram at the peak of the outage. Meanwhile, those who did get into the app are having trouble either logging in or posting any content.
Of the people that reported problems with Instagram, 75% had trouble accessing the app, while 14% couldn't post anything. Meanwhile, 11% of the report mentioned that people had trouble logging in to the app, preventing them from accessing their homepage or anything else.
At the time, any attempt to access the site or the app would result in users receiving a message that read, "Sorry, this page isn't available, per CNET.
Those that could access their accounts found that while the home page is loading properly, Instagram's Explore page is completely down. They also found that some of the app's features and services that did work were either taking a long time to load or were not loading as expected.
While Instagram didn't mention when it became aware of the issue, it took the company allegedly around six hours, or until 11 PM PST, before it could fix the cause of the outage. During that time, Instagram users flooded Twitter to air their grievances using the #instagramdown hashtag, confirming to other people that Instagram was indeed down for the time being.
Instagram's Fix
When Instagram did fix the problem, Downdetector found that Instagram outage reports fell below the 1,000 mark in the US alone. However, reports of issues are still coming in from other parts of the world, such as the UK, Japan, and Australia, whose report tallies only went down to less than 100 reports.
Instagram then posted a tweet through its Instagram Comms Twitter account and updated people on Twitter that it had fixed the issue causing the outage. A "technical issue" caused people to have trouble accessing the app and website.
"We resolved this issue for everyone as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience," Instagram added in its tweet.
As of press time, Meta has yet to address the outage Instagram experienced, while Instagram itself has yet to reveal the technical issue that led to the outage people experienced.
