Nothing sends people into a frenzy quite like Instagram going down. Our co-dependence on social media really revealed itself on Sunday evening when the app froze and users were unable to refresh their feeds. Apparently, the app was down for an hour and a half and more than 175,000 people reported it. But panic over! It's now up and running as normal and we can all continue with our lives.
What happens to make Instagram not work?
But this isn't the first time Instagram has broken either. Last October, just days after Whatsapp went down for an entire morning, Meta had another nightmare on the app. Loads of confused users took to Twitter to report their accounts have been wrongfully suspended, while others said they had suddenly dropped followers at unprecedented rates thanks to their friends’ profiles being taken down.
‘Some weird thing is happening on Instagram. I just lost 3k followers and unfollowed 30 people,’ wrote YouTuber Jin Lim. ‘Hello wtf is going on with insta?!’ panicked Love Island’s Chloe Burrows. ‘
Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold has said: 'Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Instagram. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we're sorry for any disruption this has caused.'
Luckily, Meta's other services including WhatsApp, Horizon Worlds and Facebook seemed unaffected by the glitch.
An hour and a half of no Instagram is certainly better than last year when accounts were suddenly suspended or users started spontaneously unfollowing large amounts of people. But look, maybe we should use the next Insta-free window as an opportunity: finally, you can unfollow your ex’s sister, your high school frenemy and your least favourite cousin and blame it on a Meta glitch. No hard feelings, no family feuds…