Confusion reigns over global Instagram outage

The New Daily
Oct 03, 2018, updated Oct 03, 2018

Instagram users have been left in the dark after a global outage on Wednesday. Photo: Getty

Social media site Instagram stopped working for less than an hour on Wednesday, with users worldwide creating an #instagramdown state of panic.

Australian users of the online photo-sharing service were told after 5.16pm the app “cannot refresh feed”, while those using the web version are encountering a “5xx Server Error”.

One user, Shah Melvin, said the suspected server problem had gone global with “No news feed. No story. No posting right now”.

Service resumed as normal within an hour, but it didn’t stop users from expressing their frustration on Twitter via countless memes and posts.

https://twitter.com/lovelyjeromemp4/status/1047399858028666880

instagram models and olshop sellers right now#instagramdown pic.twitter.com/ljlj11TLZs

— Wilson Chen (@wilson_candraa) October 3, 2018

https://twitter.com/Josue_The_Gr8/status/1047393401665028096

Me checking tweets to see if Instagram really is down or if my internet is just being weird. pic.twitter.com/xv8nC5IgSQ

— Isha Thorpe (@IshaThorpe) October 3, 2018

The third-largest social network on the planet, Instagram has close to one billion users. It evolved from a location check-in app called Burbn in 2010 and was sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012.

Instagram’s two founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger recently left parent company Facebook, amid rumours there was tension with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

Mr Systrom said in a statement: “We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again. Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we plan to do.”

Unsubstantiated links have also been made for the outage with the Facebook hack of more than 50 million users last weekend.

At that time it revealed that Instagram users and accounts might also have been caught up in the security breach if they had used their Facebook log-in to create their Instagram account.

https://twitter.com/Lucero14Emilio/status/1047393459219324928