Instagram Back Online After Worldwide Outage

Users of Instagram have suffered another outage of the photo-sharing service, just a week after a major shakeup of its senior management team.

The service down for some users on Wednesday, and was reportedly not working for around 45 minutes before coming back online.

This is not the first time this has happened. Last month users around the world were impacted by an outage of major social networking services including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which Facebook blamed on a “networking issue.”

Instagram outage

Reports first began surfacing of Instagram’s outage on Wednesday morning at 9am London time.

According to the website Downdetector.com, normal service was resumed just forty five minutes later.

“We’re aware that some users had trouble accessing Instagram. We have worked quickly and the issue is now resolved,” an Instagram spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday.

The outage comes after a turbulent week for the social networking website.

Last week saw the departures from Facebook of Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who said they wanted to explore their “curiosity and creativity again”.

That came just after it was revealed that WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton had clashed with Facebook management over its attempts to wring money from the app. Acton admitted that he had sold the privacy of WhatsApp users – one of the core principles upon which WhatsApp was founded.

It is not clear at this stage whether this advertising push also played a part in the departure of Systrom and Krieger.

Other outages

Facebook of course owns Instagram after it purchased photo-sharing service in 2012, in a deal originally valued at $1 billion (£779m).

It should be noted Facebook has had problems in the past maintaining 24×7 availability.

In January 2015 for example, Facebook blamed a technical fault, and not hackers, for an outage that downed its own site and those of several services it owns.

Instagram is thought to have more than one billion active monthly users and has grown by adding features such as messaging and short videos to its service.

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Tom Jowitt

Tom Jowitt is a leading British tech freelancer and long standing contributor to Silicon UK. He is also a bit of a Lord of the Rings nut...

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