Thousands of Instagram users across the UK and around the world were suddenly locked out of the platform on Thursday evening, as a major technical outage brought the social media giant to a standstill.
The disruption began around 10pm GMT, with users quickly flooding rival platforms like X (formerly Twitter) to report issues. The problems were widespread, preventing users from refreshing their feeds, viewing stories, sending direct messages, or even logging into their accounts.
Frustration and Memes Flood the Internet
As is tradition in the digital age, the outage quickly became a top trending topic online. Frustrated users turned to X and Facebook to voice their complaints, while many others responded with a wave of humorous memes poking fun at the situation.
Downdetector, a website that monitors online service outages, recorded a massive spike in reports, with over 100,000 incidents logged at the peak of the disruption. The outage map indicated significant problems in major UK cities like London, Manchester, and Birmingham, as well as across Europe and North America.
Meta Responds to the Widespread Disruption
Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, acknowledged the issue. A spokesperson for the company stated, "We're aware people are having trouble accessing our services. We are working on this now."
While the core functionality of Facebook and WhatsApp appeared to remain online for most users, some reported minor issues with those platforms as well, suggesting a potential wider infrastructure problem within Meta.
Services Gradually Restored
After several hours of downtime, service for the vast majority of users was gradually restored. The incident highlights the world's growing dependence on a small number of tech giants for daily communication and entertainment.
Meta has not yet disclosed the specific technical cause behind the major outage.
