Instagram Blames ‘Bug’ After Global Outage

Tom Jowitt,
Instagram

Monday’s Instagram outage comes less than a week after another Meta platform (WhatsApp) suffered major outage

Instagram has blamed a ‘bug’ after an outage that impacted thousands, if not millions of users around the world, who found their accounts had been suspended.

According to outage recording website, Downdetector, the Instagram outage began around 1pm GMT on Monday after and lasted several hours, But users were still reporting issues after 7pm on Monday evening.

““We suspended your account on October 31, 2022,” the warning read, before telling affected posters that their account “doesn’t follow our community guidelines” and that it will be permanently disabled in the event of the suspension being upheld.

Instagram outage

Other account holders saw the number of their followers plummet.

“We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account,” the social network said in a tweet. “We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience.”

Five hours later and Instagram tweeted that it had resolved the issue, which it blamed on a bug.

WhatsApp outage

The Instagram outage on Monday came less than a week after another Meta platform, WhatsApp, suffered a major outage.

Last Tuesday, users around the world including the UK, Asia, South Africa and Europe, began experieincing problems.

Users found they could open the app, and while they could still access their conversations, they could not receive new messages, or send any new messages.

Many users saw the following message at the top of the app, saying it is “connecting” to the server, but it then fails to do so.

There has been no official explanation from Meta as to the cause of that outage.

The last time there was this level of outage was back in October 2021, when Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram experiencing an outage that lasted for at least six hours.

Meta later said the global problem was caused by a configuration change.