If you’re planning to spend your evening browsing through the top posts of the day from your Instagram friends, we’ve got bad news for you, with the service currently unavailable globally.
By the looks of it, problems began to appear around 5pm AEST, and according to reports of users on social media, the issue has mainly affected users in Australia, the UK, parts of Asia, and the west coast of the US.
According to the website DownDetector, over 1,000 issues have been reported, with close to half of those affected reporting issues with refreshing their news feed.
https://twitter.com/baeu_taeful/status/1047393492052451328
When instagram is down and you realize this is your chance to make it big on twitter 😂😂 #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/gMDNHJldV4
— VSN Black (@vsnblack) October 3, 2018
https://twitter.com/MrBenBrown/status/1047392659168526337
While most users are reporting that they cannot load their news feed or profiles, the official website of Instagram is also being affected, showing a “5xx Service Error” if you attempt to load the page.
At this stage, Instagram have not issued a statement commenting on the downtime, and are presumably working hard to restore order to one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.
Of course, while users are speculating what caused this downtime, others are drawing connections between Instagram’s ownership by Facebook and the latter’s recent hacking controversy.
While there’s no word that the two are connected, let’s just hope that order is restored to the world of social media sooner rather than later.