Instagram, among other platforms, went down on Friday afternoon.
The tweets reporting the frustrating break in the endless scroll cycle, as expected, started quickly stacking up.
Both WhatsApp and Facebook were also down at the same time as the more-quickly-noticed Instagram disruption. Reports of an outage also showed up on the DownDetector site, with the Instagram outage being further clarified as a global one. Shortly before the filing of this article, more than 106,000 people had reported problems with Instagram on the site.
Many trying to access Instagram, Facebook, etc. had been met with server errors and/or “Sorry, something went wrong” messages on Friday. Of course, this isn’t the first time society has been forced to deal with such a deeply existential predicament.
In a statement shared with Complex, a Facebook company spokesperson said, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing some Facebook services. We resolved this issue for everyone, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Earlier this week, Instagram made headlines with its announcement of new measures aimed at making the service “safer for the youngest members of our community.” Among the new safety-minded features are the restriction of DMs between teenagers and adults they don’t follow. More specifically, adults will not be allowed to send messages to Instagram users under the age of 18 who don’t follow them.
Instagram, as well as Facebook, also recently announced new in-app and on-site measures aimed at promoting reliable information on COVID-19 and vaccines. Since the pandemic began, notably, misinformation about the pandemic has been a consistent problem on the sites.
And while Friday’s outage was ultimately resolved, that little fact didn’t slow down the tweets:
