Instagram Experiences an “Accidental” Outage

There has been an “accidental” wave of Instagram account suspensions in recent days prompting the company to open investigations on what could have possibly caused the “accident”, less than one week after WhatsApp experienced a global outage. At least 500 million people use Instagram every day.

Users started reporting challenges with accessing the social network last evening with majority turning to other social networks such as Twitter to express their disappointment. “My account has been acting up for the better part of the day,” one user wrote on Twitter. Another one added: “I have not been able to log into my account…I don’t understand what is going on.”

“We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. “We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience,” Instagram leadership said in a tweet, the only public statement on the outage.

“The scale of the accidental suspensions is significant enough that even users whose accounts are unaffected have noticed it, thanks to their displayed follower accounts dipping markedly… at the same time, the stability of the service has taken a dive, with outages reported to the website downdetector.com spiking on Monday afternoon.” the Guardian’s Alex Hurn reported.