Instagram goes down all over the world, people believe their accounts were deleted or hacked

According to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com, Meta Platform’s Instagram was down for hundreds of users worldwide.

At the height of the outage, more than 46,000 users in the United States reported problems accessing the photo-sharing platform, according to Downdetector, which monitors outages by compiling status reports from a variety of sources, including user-submitted mistakes on its platform.

Furthermore, Downdetector showed about another 2000 affected users from the UK, and more than 1,000 reports each from India and Australia earlier today.

What went wrong?
While pinpointing the exact moment when things began to go wrong is difficult, as per Downdetector, Instagram has been down for a little more than an hour as of the time this story went live, with the initial complaint coming in around 5PM PST. The number of reports has increased significantly since then.

As previously mentioned, the app and website are both loading the home stream, despite their current condition. But the Explore page is a different tale, and it appears to be totally down.

In addition to the app and website outages, it appears that refreshing takes a long time or has the propensity to time out. While it’s unclear how long this will last, other big services, most notably Twitter, have also experienced problems this month.

Outages are a common occurrence
Twitter’s service was severely disrupted just a few days ago when the website became inaccessible. While the service was ultimately restored, Twitter Support clarified that the problem was caused by a change to some items on the back end.

Of course, the circumstances for both of the platforms are unique, with some disruptions lasting only seconds and others lasting hours. Instagram, which many people use for entertainment and even work, should have a quicker recovery period.