Instagram Outage Hits Thousands Of Users Globally, Reels Displaying Error Messages

Meta-owned photo and video-sharing app Instagram was down for several minutes on Saturday, rendering thousands of users globally unable to access the platform.

More than 6,000 users in India reported issues with accessing the platform at the peak of outage at around 12:08 PM today, as per Downdetector, a website that tracks user reports of internet disruptions.

Of these, 57% of these complaints were about Instagram’s feed, 33% of users reported issues with accessing the app and 10% of users said they were facing server connection issues.

Several users turned to social media platform X to vent out their frustration with many complaining that Instagram’s short-video platform Reels failed to load and began displaying error messages.

The cause of the outage remains unknown and there is no official statement yet from Instagram on the outage.

This is not the first time that Meta has been hit by an outage. Earlier this year in March, two Meta-owned apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, blinked out for several hours, leaving local businesses in lurch.

Prior to that, in April last year, some Indian WhatsApp users faced disruption as they were unable to download videos on the app. In October 2022, WhatsApp suffered a two-hour service outage, prompting the company to issue a clarification to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

India is home to the largest user base to Meta’s family of apps. While Facebook has 378 million users in India, WhatsApp 478 Mn and Instagram 362 Mn, as per global data and business intelligence platform Statista.

A large number of local businesses are reliant on services offered by these apps and frequent outages do not augur well for them. For instance, India has services like Meesho, where sellers are hugely dependent on communication through instant messaging app WhatsApp.

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