If you can’t access your Instagram feeds, you’re not alone. Instagram has stated that some users are experiencing “access difficulties” to their accounts. As of this writing, the social network has not identified a cause, but some users have gotten warnings that their accounts have been stopped, while others have seen their follower numbers decline.
We’ve reached out to Instagram for additional information on the outage and will update you as soon as we hear back. Failure reports began to spike on Downdetector just before 9 a.m. Eastern. They’re not consistent, though, because many people aren’t seeing any issues.
We're aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. We're looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience. #instagramdown
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 31, 2022
This isn’t the first major outage in the last year. Meta’s social networks had a big outage around a year ago due to a problem that disconnected important elements of the company’s backbone network. In early October, Instagram addressed an issue that prohibited iOS users from accessing the site. A sudden crash problem in September also didn’t help. These problems aren’t often, but they do indicate that Instagram is still in its early stages.
The situation is better than in previous years. Instagram had an especially difficult 2019, with two outages in less than a month. This comes on top of a privacy breach that exposed users’ credentials to workers.
Nonetheless, this new setback comes at an inconvenient moment. Despite the fact that Instagram’s viewership is growing and has just surpassed 2 billion active users, Meta is losing money as it invests in metaverse technologies such as virtual reality devices and its Horizon Worlds platform. The company is not in immediate danger, but it needs dependability in order to expand its social media empire and offset escalating costs.