If you, like many other unsuspecting users just trying to get their Valencia filter game on Monday night, were kicked out of your Instagram app from the comfort of your own bed, trust me, you are far from alone. The question that was tweeted 'round the world remains: why is Instagram down? Around 10 p.m. on Monday, a lot of users were reporting that they were getting kicked out of the app mid-post or mid-scroll (which is seriously killing my "stalk my friend of a friend of a friend from summer camp vibe," personally). This morning a few lingering issues include people's timelines not updating, reflecting things that happened in the eight or nine hours prior but not anything that has been updated since, and some users whose apps won't open altogether. In sent users flocking in droves to Twitter to make sure they were not alone.
Bustle has reached out to Instagram for comment about why the app is down, and will update this article with an explanation upon their response. In the meantime, might I speculate that we were all so busy bragging about our screenshots of captured Pikachus on "Pokemon Go" that we inadvertently clogged up the servers? Dorkier things have happened on this internet, my friends. But while we wait for their response, here are a few reasons Instagram might have gone down, based on things that have happened with Instagram in the past:
They Might Be Working With The New Algorithm Again
Earlier this year Instagram rolled out an update that prioritized certain posts from users on your feed based on your preferences. Users first noticed the change when the posts at the top of the app were no longer chronological, instead highlighting posts from users that they most interacted with or spent time scrolling on. This feature was rolled out to a small audience at first, leading some people to believe Instagram was glitching — Monday's issues with Instagram might be associated with the rollouts to the feed as well.
Instagram Users May Have Overwhelmed The Servers
Another common reason apps go down temporarily is when their user base is higher than anticipated, overwhelming the servers (you may have seen a lot of people tweeting about this when "Pokemon Go" was down last week). Although Instagram has always been a popular app, maybe for some reason last night more people were flocking to it than usual, causing the network to crash.
Instagram Is Having Another "Outage"
In April 2016, Instagram experienced a brief, worldwide outage of the app, which didn't allow users to log on at all. It seems unlikely that this is the case right now, since users were redirected to a 504 page when that happened — whereas in case users can at least still open the app and access Instagram on their desktops.
So what are the 'grammers supposed to do until we're back online? If the app still isn't working for you, you can check Down Detector to see if it's still out for everyone else as well. You can also try closing out of the app entirely and reopening it, which seems to help update your feed. And if all else fails, good news! Instagram is still working on desktop ... if you remember how to use one of those, that is.
And hey, at the very least your camera app is still working. Go out in the world, y'all, and take pictures of your bacon sandwiches and flowers with fences and artful side-face selfies. I'm sure Instagram will be back and running soon, at which point we can all get back to stalking our faves and gracing the world with our filtering #gift.
