• Users of Facebook and WhatsApp encountered access problems.
Image: COURTESY
Instagram users across the globe reported problems logging in, sharing or otherwise accessing the Facebook-owned photo and video service on mobile apps and the web on Wednesday.
Instagram began having issues since 8:45 a.m. ET, with most of the user reports concentrated in the Northeast U.S. and Western Europe, according to DownDetector.com.
For many Instagram users, most images and videos were failing to load in the app on Wednesday, July 3. On desktop, Instagram also was not loading images or videos, accompanied by a message that said "No photo description available" or messages with tags like "Image may contain: food." Some said when they tried to post photos, Instagram only displayed the caption and not the image, while other users reported an inability to access the service at all.
Predictably, many disgruntled Instagram users took to Twitter to vent their frustration, and the hashtag #instagramdown became the top-trending topic on Twitter on Wednesday morning in the U.S.
In addition to Instagram, users of Facebook and WhatsApp were also encountering access problems. "We're aware that some people and businesses are currently having trouble uploading or sending images, videos and other files on our apps," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience."
The latest problems come three weeks after Instagram had an outage that lasted more than two hours, on June 13. In that case, some users reported that they couldn't access Instagram at all, while others couldn't conduct searches or access other parts of the service. Instagram's website also in some cases displayed a "5xx server error" message. That came after two other previously reported major outages in June.
Instagram's technical issues come a day after an outage at Cloudflare, a content-delivery and security services provider, caused multiple websites and services to be inaccessible Tuesday, including OKCupid, Peloton, Feedly, Discord and (ironically) DownDetector. Cloudflare said the outage was caused by "a bad software deploy."