Every second counts on social media, and therefore, five minutes is almost a lifetime. That’s what it felt like when Instagram was down for about five minutes, between 5.56 pm and 6.01 pm, which was long enough for it to start trending on Twitter with the hashtag #instagramdown.
Interestingly, Instagram itself hasn’t come up with a statement as to why the website and the app were inaccessible to people around the world. The website downdetector.com, which tracks outages of sites across the world, show a large number of reports coming in from the UK, India, US and Japan about the site being down.
The moment Instagram went down, users took to Twitter to check if the issue was a local one or a global event. Turns out, it was a global event.
A few weeks ago Twitter went down – but not for everyone, some could still post. A few months ago, Facebook went down for a few minutes as well. Each time, internet users quickly posted updates on alternate social media platforms about the outage.
Instagram hasn’t given any reasons for the outage – it could be just routine server rebooting or maintenance, but it just goes to show how dependent people have become on social media.
Where else are they going to post the next pouting selfie or their latest meal? Anyway, Instagram’s back for now.
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