Instagram was hit by a global outage on Thursday morning, as around 53,000 users reported not being able to access the photo and video sharing platform.
Confirming to fault, Instagram tweeted the hashtag ‘#instagramdown,’ mimicking a trend sparked on Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) after Elon Musk’s social media suffered a repeated issues in February.
According to monitoring website Downdetector, Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s Instagram was largely out of action between 1:30 and 3:30am, though issues were quickly fixed.
“Earlier tonight, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing Instagram,” the social media confirmed in a tweet.
“We resolved this issue for everyone as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Twitter’s workforce has been severely cut from around 8,000 to below 2,000 people since October, when Musk bought the platform for US$44bn, leaving it unable to fix issues and protect users online, according to employees.
As a result, Twitter has faced sustained issues in recent months, while rivals such as Instagram have been able to fix outages more quickly.
Instagram outages reported in the last 24 hours - Downdetector
Twitter outages reported in the last 24 hours - Downdetector
Meta's share price was largely unaffected by the outage, remaining flat at US$184.70 in after hours trading.