Thousands of Instagram users affected by global app outage

Thousands of Instagram users were unable to access the app this morning as the platform suffered a massive, global outage.

Instagram was hit by an outage on Monday morning. Picture: iStock

Thousands of Instagram users were unable to access the app this morning as the platform suffered a massive outage.

The Instagram app was unable to load for many users right across the world early Monday morning.

More than 100,000 international users experienced issues with the app, while at least 10,000 Australians were affected.

Instagram was hit by an outage on Monday morning. Picture: iStock

Many users reported the issue, but so far, the social media juggernaut is yet to respond publicly to the incident, or confirm what caused the outage.

The website Down Detector, which reports real-time problems and provides outage monitoring, revealed a huge spike in outage reports starting at around 8am AEST.

Instagram DOWN: Thousands of users report outage; App not loading.

The outage began few minutes back, as per Downdetector, "User reports indicate Instagram is having problems since 18:05 PM EDT.”#InstagramDown#Instagram@[e-mail]/X8EAFXrbIm

— Jaymin Shah (@JayminSOfficial) May 21, 2023

The vast majority of issues were connected to the app, with a small minority of users experiencing trouble with the website.

Users reported being unable to access messages, profiles and comments.

Instagram users also took to Twitter to report the outage, but a Meta spokesman has since confirmed the issue has been resolved.

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Instagram,” the spokesman told news.com.au.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused.”

Reports of an outage began flooding in from around 8am this morning. Picture: Down Detector

Those impacted by the glitch were met with the message “Sorry, something went wrong” or just “sorry, couldn’t refresh feed” when attempting to open their Instagram feed.

While the outage was an inconvenience for most, for others whose business relies on the platform, it caused more serious headaches.

“‘My job requires me to access social media so Instagram being down right now is stuffing with my money,” one frustrated person complained on Twitter.

“Completely refuses to load any content or settings except for a couple of icons. Stated reason “unexpected errors try again later” … I always think errors are unexpected but this time it’s interfering with my business … need help!” another shared to Down Detector.

Instagram is owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, although other services under the Meta umbrella did not appear to be impacted.

Affected users were met with this message. Picture: Instagram

The last major outage to plague the platform was in September 2022.