For a few hours on Sunday night, Instagram was down. The app’s feed froze, throwing errors at users saying it couldn’t be refreshed, while the website just provided a blank page. According to outage tracker DownDetectorthe first reports of the problem began a few minutes after 6PM ET before climbing to over 175,000 reports at its peak, but by 7:30PM ET, the issue appeared to have been resolved and it was working again.
In an email to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold acknowledged the loss, saying, “We know some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We are working hard to get things back to normal as soon as possible and apologize for any inconvenience.”
Other services owned by Instagram’s parent company Meta, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, or Horizon Worlds, do not appear to be affected. There is no sign of any issues like the massive datacenter backbone problem that knocked out the company’s services for hours in 2021.
Instagram’s help page and accounts on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter did not post any updates about the outage. An Instagram-owned service like Twitter would be a good place to check, but despite rumors and leaks, it doesn’t exist yet.
Update on May 21, 7:20PM ET: Added a comment from a Meta spokesperson confirming the Instagram outage.
Update on May 21, 7:42PM ET: Updated to note that the outage appears to be over.