The social media app Instagram suffered a worldwide outage including in Pakistan but it was back after a couple of hours.
The app’s feed was frozen, tossing users errors saying it couldn’t refresh, while the website only gave a blank page.
According to the outage tracker DownDetector, the first reports of trouble started a few minutes after 6PM ET before spiking to over 175,000 reports at its peak, but by 7:30PM ET, the issue had been resolved, and it’s working again.
In an email to The Verge after the outage, Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold said, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Instagram. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused.”
Given the timing, the outage quickly surfaced as a part of Monday morning news reports in Australia.
Other services belonging to Instagram’s parent company, Meta, like Facebook, WhatsApp, or Horizon Worlds, appear unaffected. There’s no sign of issues like the massive datacenter backbone problem that took down the company’s services for hours in 2021.
Instagram confirmed in a tweet at 8:19 p.m. ET that it had a “brief outage” and the issue that caused it has been “resolved.”
Down Detector, which tracks website outages, has received over 98,000 reports of Instagram being down within minutes.
The app says “Sorry, something went wrong,” or just “sorry, couldn’t refresh feed,” whenever trying to load a user’s home feed.
Instagram, much like other social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok, has become an important tool for individuals and businesses around the world. Instagram recently suffered another outage just a few days ago, though that appeared to be much more localized.