THOUSANDS of Instagram users have been left unable to login to the social network on October 14, 2021.
Here is what we know about the outage.
Is Instagram down?
Instagram users reported that the social media app was not working on Thursday, October 14.
The outage began to hit users just before 8am, UK time (3am EST), according to online outage tracker DownDetector.
Almost 300 people have logged problems with the photo-sharing service this morning.
More than half the users reported issues with the Instagram app, while 24 per cent reported problems with their feeds.
Apparently, some people cannot refresh their feeds – the stream of photos and videos that forms the main landing page of their app.
Some reported on DownDetector that they couldn’t comment on pictures, while others said their feed wouldn’t update on the app.
How to check if Instagram is working?
First you can visit the Instagram Help page. Here you’ll find various options available in the panel on the left of the page.
Then select known Issues. Any problems that Instagram may be encountering should be displayed here.
Also, it is always good to check if you are running the latest version of the app.
Android users should visit the Google Play Store and tap on the three lines in the upper left corner.
In the menu select My Apps & Games>Updates and then see if there are newer versions available.
If Instagram is there be sure to tap the Update button to the right of its name.
iPhone users will need to open the App Store, tap on the Updates tab at the bottom of the page.
Failing all this, you can go to an independent status checking site such Is It Down or Just Me, Is It Down Right Now and Down Detector.
When else has Instagram gone down?
The last major outage was on October 4.
Downdetector was hit with a sharp spike in users reporting that they were having problems using the image-sharing app’s features.
Users were experiencing the same with WhatsApp and Facebook.
Users reported being unable to access the smartphone apps and websites of the hugely popular services.
The scale of the incident has sparked renewed calls for big technology platforms to be broken up and greater choice and competition offered to consumers said Margrethe Vestager.
The incident highlighted the negative impact of big tech firms controlling large swathes of the online world.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Facebook’s Santosh Janardhan said.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
