Instagram Back Up After Experiencing Global Outage

The photo-sharing social media app went down Thursday.

Corinne Reichert Senior Editor

Corinne Reichert (she/her) grew up in Sydney, Australia and moved to California in 2019. She holds degrees in law and communications, and currently writes news, analysis and features for CNET across the topics of electric vehicles, broadband networks, mobile devices, big tech, artificial intelligence, home technology and entertainment. In her spare time, she watches soccer games and F1 races, and goes to Disneyland as often as possible.

Expertise News, mobile, broadband, 5G, home tech, streaming services, entertainment, AI, policy, business, politics Credentials

I've been covering technology and mobile for 12 years, first as a telecommunications reporter and assistant editor at ZDNet in Australia, then as CNET's West Coast head of breaking news, and now in the Thought Leadership team.

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Corinne Reichert

July 14, 2022 3:54 p.m. PT

Sarah Tew/CNET

Instagram experienced an outage across the globe, tens of thousands of complaints on Down Detector and Twitter on Thursday showed.

Reports on Down Detector spiked to more than 23,400 at 1:48 p.m. PT after the outage apparently began around 1 p.m., with hundreds of users flocking to Twitter -- which experienced its own outage earlier Thursday -- to complain.

"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We're working to get things back to normal and apologize for any inconvenience," a Meta spokesperson told CNET in an emailed statement.

Attempting to launch the app on mobile caused it to crash instantly, but the site appeared to be back up and running as of 2:20 p.m. PT.

Instagram parent Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on what caused the outage.