Instagram down? Users worldwide say DMs stopped working as Meta app hit by outage

Instagram users around the world reported widespread disruptions on Wednesday after the Meta-owned social media platform appeared to suffer a major outage.

Thousands of users said they were unable to send direct messages, refresh their feeds or access parts of the app, prompting a surge of complaints online as people rushed to check whether the platform was down.

Outage tracking website Downdetector showed a sharp spike in reports, with more than 12,000 users flagging problems at the peak of the disruption. Nearly three-quarters of those complaints came from people using the Instagram mobile app.

Several major US cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, New York and Washington, recorded high numbers of outage reports.

Users in India also experienced issues, with more than 1,300 reports logged during the peak period. Downdetector said the number of complaints was “significantly higher than the baseline”, suggesting a widespread technical fault.

While messaging failures appeared to be the most common problem, some users also said their Instagram feeds were failing to load or refresh.

Others reported that profile pages would not open or that older chat histories were temporarily inaccessible, raising the possibility that the platform was struggling to connect with backend servers.

As confusion spread, many users turned to other platforms, including X, to confirm whether the outage was affecting others.

Data from Downdetector indicated that about 18 per cent of reports were linked to server connection issues.

Despite the problems affecting Instagram, other services owned by Meta, including Facebook and WhatsApp, appeared to be operating normally.

Meta had not issued an official statement about the outage at the time of writing.