Instagram is back online following 2-hour outage and Twitter memefest

After a two-hour outage which affected several iOS and Android users' login activities worldwide, services on Meta-owned photo and video-sharing platform Instagram resumed Friday morning.

Meta Platform's Instagram was down for thousands of users late Thursday, according to a report. Nearly 19,000 users were having trouble accessing the social networking platform Instagram, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.

The outage affected users mostly from across the US, South America, Asia and Europe. "And we are back! We resolved the issue that caused today's outage and apologise for any inconvenience," Instagram said in a tweet.



According to reports, Instagram outage reports were 65 per cent for app crashes, 24 per cent for server connections and 11 per cent for login-related issues.

Soon after the matter reached the micro-blogging platform Twitter with users sharing memes, Instagram had confirmed the issue and apologised for the inconvenience. “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience, and hang tight!,” read the tweet.

Meanwhile, several users complained about the incident and shared memes which led to #instagramdown trending as a hashtag on the social media site.







On the other hand, Instagram is currently working on several features including a tool that will protect users from receiving nude and explicit content in their direct messages (DMs) from unknown people.

Meta confirmed to The Verge that such a feature is in the development to protect Instagram users' privacy.

"We're working closely with experts to ensure these new features preserve people's privacy, while giving them control over the messages they receive," a company spokesperson was quoted as saying.

The tech giant said that the technology will not allow it to view the actual messages, nor share them with third parties. Instagram is frequently working on its privacy and security tools as it is one of the most used social networking platform with millions of users, largely consisting teens.