Instagram Suffers Brief Outage Affecting Hundred of Thousands

Low De Wei, Bloomberg News

Facebook Inc. Instagram signage is displayed on an Apple Inc. iPhone in an arranged photograph taken in the Brooklyn Borough of New York, U.S., on Sunday, Jan. 26, 2020. Facebook Inc. is scheduled to release earnings figures on January 29. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app owned by Meta Platforms Inc., appeared to suffer an outage Sunday evening in the US, with tens of thousands of users reporting that they could not access the service.

Issues reported by users began spiking around 6 p.m. New York time, peaking at more than 185,000 about an hour later according to tracking site Downdetector. The number of reports began to steadily decline shortly thereafter and the service appears to be back online. This was the second widespread disruption in just over two months.

“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,” a Meta spokesperson said. Instagram used the same language to describe its March downtime.

Instagram hosts more than 2 billion users per month and some of Meta’s key growth initiatives, such as its Reels product, a rival to TikTok in short video. It is also preparing a Twitter rival for release this summer, seizing on the opportunity created by the upheaval at the company acquired by Elon Musk in October.

Read more: Meta’s Instagram Readies Twitter Competitor for Summer Debut

--With assistance from Natalie Choy.

(Updates with Meta comment)