Instagram Takes A Header And Goes Down Leaving Thousands Locked Out

Outages and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are fairly commomplace now, adn can be bit of a nuisance. A plethora of Instagram users discovered this earlier today when the social media platform owned by Meta took a dive, preventing folks from posting photos or sending direct messages. It would now appear that things have stabilized, but it is unknown what initially caused the outage and whether it could happen again.

Around 4:30am EST, Instagram users from around the world took to other social media platforms to see if anyone else was having issues with the Meta-owned website. On the Instagram subreddit, user Shamone70-1 asked if “Is insta down for y’all?” to which 232 people replied largely explaining that it was down for them wherever they were in the world. Further, Ookla’s DownDetector service received 17,766 reports about Instagram being down or unreachable, but that slowly tapered off and has come down to around only a couple hundred reports as of writing.


At this time, it is unclear what happened, and Meta or Instagram have not commented on the situation. However, we can speculate about what could have happened to cause this widespread outage. There is always the risk of a bad update or a mistake made in a data cente by an employee tinkering around, leading to an outage. In the past though, we have also seen issues with upstream providers like Cloudflare taking down websites across the internet. Also, as previously alluded, it is possible there was a DDoS attack that was thwarted in short order.

It will be interesting to see if Instagram gives a statement on the matter, as it is unlike the company to have the service go down for that long. Hopefully we will hear more about this soon, so stay tuned to HotHardware for any updates on the Instagram outage.