Meta’s Instagram and Facebook Messenger platforms suffered a temporary outage across the globe late on Wednesday night.
The issues were resolved early morning on Thursday. Many users across the globe were unable to access the platforms’ messaging services. Users took to social media to report issues with messaging on Instagram and Messenger, while the hashtag #instagramdown began trending on Twitter.
According to DownDetector, a service that tracks internet outages, at 12:01 am IST, over 4,700 users in India alone had reported issues with the platform.
It received over 150 reports for Facebook and over 260 reports for Facebook Messenger. Globally, over 9,800 user reports for Instagram, more than 3,800 for Facebook Messenger and over 2,600 for Facebook were received.
The company acknowledged the issue at around 1 am IST.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Messenger, Workplace Chat and Instagram DMs. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience. #instagramdown,” Facebook’s EMEA Communications Manager, Alexandru Voica, tweeted.
*We’re aware some of you are having trouble accessing our messaging apps at the moment. We’re working to fix things as quickly as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience, and hang tight! #instagramdown,” Instagram tweeted from the official Instagram Comms account at 1:33 am IST.
The issues were resolved over three hours later.
“And we’re back! The issue’s been fixed, so if you were having trouble with DMs earlier you should be all good now. Thanks for bearing with us!” Instagram said at 4:34 am IST.
The company did not specify the exact issue.
“Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble accessing Workplace Chat, Instagram DMs and Messenger. We fixed the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted,” wrote Voica.
“We know people and businesses depend on our services around the world and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused,” Voica added.
Last month, a nearly seven-hour-long outage had impacted Meta’s apps and products, including Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp as well as its virtual reality offering Oculus. It had also impacted its internal systems and tools.
The company had attributed the outage to disruption in network traffic caused by a configuration issue on the backbone routers that coordinate traffic between its data centres.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt,” it had explained in a blog post.
Following the outage, Instagram announced that it would test new notifications to inform people of outages within the platform, starting with the US.
“We’re going to test out new notifications when certain parts of Instagram aren’t working, and we notice that people have a lot of questions. We want to make it easier to understand what’s going on, directly from the source. For now, we’ll be testing it out just in the US,” it had said.
