It wasn't just you; Instagram was down on Sunday for a couple of hours

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What you need to know

Instagram reportedly went down for a couple of hours on Sunday.
The social media platform wouldn’t load the feed during the outage.
It has been quickly fixed by the company, nonetheless.

It is quite common to witness social media apps going down occasionally, making the app a bit difficult to use. But, experiencing such an outage on a Sunday evening was a bit of an offset for many.

Meta-owned Instagram has faced a server issue for a couple of hours this Sunday evening (via The Verge). It made user feeds freeze and return with error prompts when they tried to refresh the feed. Meanwhile, the app’s website also submitted a blank page when users tried to access it.

The initial reports of the outage were first spotted from users in Australia in the early mornings of Monday. According to The Verge, only a few users started reporting on the DownDetector around 6PM ET, which apparently spiked to over 175,000. And by 7:30 PM ET, the issue seemed to have been sorted by the social media platform.

The other services owned by Meta, like Facebook and WhatsApp, were working fine.

Meta’s spokesperson Dave Arnold has spoken to The Verge via an email responding to the outage, saying, “earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Instagram. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused.”

Instagram is back! Sorry for the trouble - we had a brief outage earlier and resolved the issue that caused it. #instagramdownMay 22, 2023

Additionally, Instagram has acknowledged the issue on its Twitter page, stating that the problem was quickly resolved. The company, however, hasn’t explicitly shared the reason behind the outage, although it is pretty common for social media apps to face outages.

In other news, Instagram has announced that it is now adding support for GIF comments for users to react to posts and reels worldwide, meaning both iOS and Android users can now access the feature. And in the coming weeks, we can also expect new editing capabilities for Instagram Reels as part of the latest announcements.

Vishnu is a freelance news writer for Android Central. Since 2018, he has written about consumer technology, especially smartphones, computers, and every other gizmo connected to the internet. When he is not at the keyboard, you can find him on a long drive or lounging on the couch binge-watching a crime series.