Update 21/05/2023 at 07:38pm ET: Instagram and Facebook are now back online. The company has still not released an official statement about the outage. However, prior to service resumption, Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold acknowledged the outage in an email to The Verge, saying, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Back in 2021, after Instagram suffered a major outage, it said that it is testing out a new feature that will alert users of outages or technical difficulties directly in the app. The outage indication is supposed to be visible in the then ‘Activity’ tab, which is the ‘Notifications’ tab now. No such indication has appeared yet.

Original story below…

Meta-owned Instagram is currently down for users globally.

The outage detector website DownDetector suggests that Instagram went down roughly at 6 pm ET on Sunday, May 21st.

The platform is inaccessible on the web, and the mobile app currently shows a “Couldn’t refresh feed” prompt alongside a “We’re sorry, but something went wrong. Please try again” prompt. Users are also reporting issues with logging in, loading stories, and sending messages on the app.

instagram down everybody pic.twitter.com/u0ylPNRrFc

— JAYE CANE (@Jayecane) May 21, 2023

Meta-owned Facebook also seems to be affected by the same outage, and DownDetector suggests that the platform started experiencing issues around 5:58 pm ET. The reason for the outage is currently unknown. Meta hasn’t released a statement about the outage yet.

More to come…