Instagram is down

As you may already know if you’re reading this — Instagram is down. The app’s feed is frozen, tossing users errors that it can’t refresh, while the website gives only a blank page. In an email to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold acknowledged the outage, saying, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

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, and there’s no sign of a resolution yet.

At the moment, other services belonging to Instagram’s parent company Meta, like Facebook, WhatsApp, or Horizon Worlds, appear to be unaffected. There’s no sign of any issues like the massive datacenter backbone problem that took down the company’s services for hours in 2021, and usually, outages like these have been resolved quickly.

Instagram’s help page and accounts on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter haven’t posted any updates about the outage. An Instagram-owned service like Twitter would be a good place to check, but despite the rumors and leaks, it doesn’t exist yet.

Update May 21st, 7:20PM ET: Added comment from Meta spokesperson confirming the Instagram outage.