If you found yourself asking colleagues and friends "is Instagram down?" while furiously trying to refresh your account's feed on your phone a few hours ago, don't worry: You absolutely were not alone. On Tuesday, June 12, the app was indeed down for roughly two hours between 12 p.m. EDT and 2 p.m. EDT, so if you noticed that you weren't able to see any new photos or watch someone's Stories, everyone else was in the same boat as you. Many had issues accessing the photo sharing app for the second time during the month of June, leading to some social media panic. Bustle has reached out to Instagram for comment on why the app was down, but has not yet heard back.
According to Down Detector, an independent site that tracks and monitors outages across the world, there was a surge of reports that Instagram was not working on Tuesday, June 12. Down Detector's outage map shows that Instagram users began reporting issues with the app at 11:57 p.m. EDT, with a particularly high spike in reports around 1 p.m. EDT. The issues appeared to affect the way photos were loading, with many users saying they couldn't see any new posts on their feed, and others saying that it was taking a long time for anything to load properly. It also affected some users' abilities to leave comments on photos. Additionally, it appears that it was a worldwide issue, as users in the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the United States, and Canada reporting problems with the app.
So, why was the app down? At present, Instagram has not released any information on why so many users were having trouble accessing the app for the majority of the day, so it's not clear if there were specific issues just yet — however, when an app is as large as Instagram is, the occasional blip or error is to be expected. Technology isn't always as reliable as we want it to be, you know?
As of 2:30 p.m. EST, reports on Down Detector seem to show that the app is working again for most users. Since we aren't sure exactly what caused the app to go down, we can't be totally sure that it won't happen again. It also seems like the app might not be back up for everyone - as of 3 PM EST, there were still users tweeting about the fact that Instagram wasn't working for them.
Of course, users have been flocking to Twitter all day to vent, complain, and wonder what the heck is going on. Many users went on Twitter as soon as they had trouble with Instagram to make sure they weren't alone, and were relieved to find that they weren't the only ones doing so:
While a lot of Instagram users are simply counting down the moments until they can see another photo of aesthetically pleasing avocado toast or someone's jealousy-inducing travel pictures (I am fully making fun of myself here), some people felt a little bit of relief at the idea of being cut off from the app for a bit.
And some users took this moment to ask the really important questions:
There's one advantage of Instagram not working: it results in some seriously entertaining Twitter content. It actually kind of feels like Twitter becomes one big party where everyone gathers to complain and joke about the same thing. And if you're really bored and missing your feed, just read some of these tweets, which will definitely make you laugh.
At least we're all in this one together!
