Thousands of Instagram users said Tuesday that the social media app was repeatedly crashing or not opening at all, the third time in just over a month that the social network has experienced issues.
The crashing problem persisted for hours by late Tuesday afternoon, with no official response from Instagram about what was causing it and when it was going to be fixed. Instagram’s known issues page had no information about the crashing bug.
Users began to complain that about problems accessing Instagram starting around 7 a.m. PT, though complaints spiked around 10 a.m. PT, according to DownDetector. The problems continued well into Tuesday afternoon, with angry users unable to even open the application.
Some people said they were having issues accessing the news feed and others were unable to log in. Many users on Twitter said Instagram’s app was continually crashing when they tried to update their feed or locking them out of their account altogether.
The outage largely affected users in North America, though some users in Europe were also experiencing problems.
Is anyone elses instagram acting up like this? 🤦♀️ #instagramisdown #instagramdownagain #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/0VAgH6eaGV
— I z z y (@izzybizzii) July 16, 2019
We’ve reached out to Instagram to see what’s going on and will update this story as soon as we hear back. A spokeswoman told CNBC that it was looking into the issue, and later said the issue had been fixed — but users said their app was still crashing well into the afternoon.
The company released an update for its iOS app on Tuesday that included “bug fixes and performance improvements,” but it’s not clear if that’s related to the outage.
Social media-loving Instagram users quickly took to Twitter to joke about the outage.
https://twitter.com/evclynnn/status/1151180710444752899
Instagram is down again!!! 🤦♀️😤#instagramdownagain #everyotherweek pic.twitter.com/qHIG8KYrC4
— spring_photography (@springphotogra1) July 16, 2019
It’s been a tough summer for Instagram users. The network went down for just over an hour in June. In early July, users experienced a multitude of problems using Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp over the course of 12 hours, with many people unable to view or upload photos.
In March, all three of the Facebook-owned services experienced a 15-hour outage, the worst in Facebook’s history, which was caused by a server configuration change.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated with the latest information.
