Late Monday night, users of the popular photo-sharing social network Instagram began reporting experiencing issues with the app. Since it’s now Tuesday morning, one would hope that whatever was plaguing the app has been fixed — but in case you were curious about how to tell if Instagram is down still, the good news is that it’s easily done. And the better news is that it appears to be working right now… mostly.
It’s still not totally clear what may have been causing the issue (Bustle has reached out to Instagram for comment), but according to the International Business Times, the app began repeatedly crashing for some users in the United States, Japan, Australia, and a few locations in Southeast Asia. Down Detector shows that reports of incidents spiked fairly dramatically around 10 p.m. Monday night, reaching a high of around 22,872 reports — although to be fair, that’s small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, as Instagram has more than 300 million daily active users. In any event, though, the crash incidents spawned a couple of Twitter hashtags, “Instagram Down” and “Instagram Not Working,” because how else are we going to cope with the inability to share our extremely photogenic breakfasts with the world?
But again, the good news is that determining whether or not Instagram is experiencing widespread outages is actually pretty simple. First, there’s the aforementioned Down Detector, which tracks incident reports for popular websites and online services. As of 8:25 a.m. EST on Tuesday morning, here’s what Down Detector’s graph of recent Instagram issues looks like:
According to this data, fewer than 5,000 reports have come in recently, so if there still is a problem, it isn’t nearly as widespread as it was last night.
Down Detector also has a map showing which areas of the globe are experiencing problems in real time; as of this writing, it looks like this:
As you can see, reports of problems appear mostly to be centered on the East Coast of the United States and down in South America.
Then there’s also Is It Down Right Now?, which is probably one of my most-used web-based tools. It works by pinging particular websites and seeing if it gets a response; if it does and you’re experiencing issues, the problem is probably on your end, while if it doesn’t, then more people are probably going through the same thing. Right now, the Is It Down Right Now? Page for Instagram notes that it’s working just fine:
But it’s worth noting that this may just be the Instagram website, rather than the app itself. Keep checking Down Detector and Is it Down Right Now? (and other sites like them), though, and you should be able to keep an eye on how things are going.
Instagram hasn’t yet commented on the issue itself, but hey, at least it looks like it’s starting to get resolved; fewer than 5,000 incident reports is miles better than almost 23,000. And ultimately? I mean… it’s just Instagram. The universe is going to implode because of a lack of avocado toast pictures, so we may as well just sit tight and relax. It’ll all blow over eventually.
Images: Lucia Peters/Bustle (3)
