Instagram DOWN: Hundreds of users report outage; App not loading, glitch in stories

Instagram down: Hundreds of users are facing trouble loading the app as well as viewing and posting stories today, May 18. Many have taken to Twitter to highlight the issue.

Instagram goes down for hundreds of users. The outage has resulted in users not being able to access the app. (Unsplash)

Instagram down: On the morning of May 18, today, the popular social media platform Instagram became unresponsive for a large number of users. In what appears to be an issue affecting the USA and nearby regions, Instagram users are facing problems logging into the platform, accessing the feed,  viewing and posting stories, and more. While the issue affects a larger number of people, as many as 780 people have reported the issue online to DownDetector. The reason behind this outage is not known at the moment, but the platform faced a similar issue in March 2023 when the servers suffered a downtime. The issue is still ongoing, although some users have said they were able to access the app eventually.

According to DownDetector, an independent outage monitoring website, the first spike began at around 5:34 AM in the morning and the reports peaked at around 7:19 AM. Among the issues faced by users, 63 percent claimed issues loading the app, 26 percent said they faced problems logging in and 12 percent were not able to access the website.

Reporting the issue on Twitter, the official handle of DownDetector said, “User reports indicate Instagram is having problems since 10:04 PM EDT. http://downdetector.com/status/instagram/… RT if you're also having problems #Instagramdown”.

Instagram goes down, users left frustrated

Although the issues are widespread and are affecting multiple functionalities of the platform, the majority of the users have said they are struggling with accessing the feed, explore, and Reels page in particular.

It appears that the issue is not a global one and regions in and around the USA have been primarily hit by the outage.

Many users have rushed to Twitter in order to tweet about the issue as well as to post memes and jokes around the situation.

One user tweeted, “instagram down for anybody else? I can't see anybodys story and I can't see my story views”. Another replied to it saying, “Yes. Checked Twitter to make sure I wasn't going crazy”. 

Another user specified the issues they were facing and said, “is instagram down for anybody else? it's not letting see anyone's story or see the views on my story”. 

At the moment, the reason behind the outage or the time it might take for the issue to be resolved is not known. Instagram has not made any official announcement so far.

Instagram recently suffered a major outage on March 9, 2023, when more than 30,000 users globally were affected by it.