Instagram has stopped working, leaving people unable to load posts or stories.
The outage comes amid another major outage at PlayStation Network, meaning that two of the biggest online services in the world have been hit by problems at the same time.
Instead of loading up posts as normal, the app showed an error page reading “couldn’t refresh feed” and would do nothing else.
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Attempting to load Instagram profiles on the web also brought up a Facebook-branded error message. “Sorry, something went wrong,” it read, “we’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”
There doesn’t seem to be any way to fix or get around the problem, such as shutting the app or trying from a different account. The wide scale of the outage suggests the issue is with Instagram’s servers or the underlying infrastructure that allows users to access them, meaning it will require an equally large scale solution.
A vast number of tweets were posted within minutes of the outage, from users joking that they only ever visited the rival social media site to see whether Instagram had broken. Some users also said they had been worried their Instagram profiles had been deleted or they had been kicked off the service, until they realised it had broken for everyone.
1/11 Hide and reorder filters
Filters are a core part of Instagram, but there are so many available it can be easy to get lost. You can change the order in which they appear, and even hide the ones you never use, to speed up your photo-sharing process. On the filters page, scroll to the end, tap Manage, then drag and drop the ones you want to reorder, and un-check the ones you want to hide.
2/11 Never miss a post
Instagram controversially ditched its reverse-chronological order feed for a new order determined by an algorithm, making it easy to completely miss some posts. To make sure you never miss a certain somebody’s updates, you can set up notification for them by visiting their profile, tapping the three dots in the top right-hand corner and selecting Turn On Post Notifications.
3/11 Eat less data
If you’re worried about how much of your mobile data Instagram saps, you can limit it by sacrificing the speed at which the photos and videos in your feed load. Go to your profile, tap the three dots in the top right corner, open Cellular Data Use and choose Use Less Data.
4/11 See your Likes
It’s easy to lose track of your friends’ old posts on Instagram, but if you know you Liked it, you’ll be able to track it down easily. Just go to your profile, hit the three dots at the top and select Posts You’ve Liked. You can also save posts in a folder only you can see by tapping the bookmark icon underneath it. Take a look at everything you’ve bookmarked by tapping the same icon that sits near the top of your profile.
5/11 Find relevant hashtags
Everyone knows you can expand the reach of your posts by using a number of relevant hashtags, but what those are aren’t always glaringly obvious. You can easily find the right ones for you by typing a keyword into Instagram’s search bar, selecting a hashtag from the list and swiping along the Related row that appears at the top of the screen.
6/11 Clear your search history
Whatever your reasons are, you can clear your recent searches by going to your profile, hitting the three dots in the top right and selecting Clear Search History. To go a step further and hide your Suggested searches too, go to the search page, tap and hold the account you want to hide, and choose Hide from the pop-up window.
7/11 Hide photos you’re tagged in
Tagged photos on Instagram aren’t as prominent as they are on Facebook, but anyone can still browse through other people’s pictures of you by visiting your profile and tapping the photo of you icon. If you’re tagged in a picture you don’t want other people to see, go to your profile, hit the photos of you icon, tap the three dots at the top of the screen and choose Hide Photos.
8/11 Secure your account
Make your Instagram account much harder to hack by enabling two-factor authentication, a security feature that protects you even if your login details are stolen. Go to your profile, tap the three dots, open Two-Factor Authentication and toggle it on.
9/11 Share lots at once
If you want to upload a bunch of related pictures and videos without flooding everyone else’s feed, you can shared them all as one post. Hit the + icon, select Gallery, choose Select Multiple, pick out up to 10 of the pictures and clips you want, tap Next and reorder them by dragging and dropping.
10/11 Record hands-free
Instagram Stories has been a massive hit since it came out last year, but you might not know that you can record Stories clips without having to hold one of your digits on the record key. On the Stores screen, just swipe through the options at the bottom until you get to Hands-Free.
11/11 Edit posts after publishing
Most people know you can delete any of the images you’ve already posted, but not everyone is aware that you can also edit them. Instagram unfortunately doesn’t let you tinker with filters and effects, but you can change your original caption, tag people and update the location.
1/11 Hide and reorder filters
Filters are a core part of Instagram, but there are so many available it can be easy to get lost. You can change the order in which they appear, and even hide the ones you never use, to speed up your photo-sharing process. On the filters page, scroll to the end, tap Manage, then drag and drop the ones you want to reorder, and un-check the ones you want to hide.
2/11 Never miss a post
Instagram controversially ditched its reverse-chronological order feed for a new order determined by an algorithm, making it easy to completely miss some posts. To make sure you never miss a certain somebody’s updates, you can set up notification for them by visiting their profile, tapping the three dots in the top right-hand corner and selecting Turn On Post Notifications.
3/11 Eat less data
If you’re worried about how much of your mobile data Instagram saps, you can limit it by sacrificing the speed at which the photos and videos in your feed load. Go to your profile, tap the three dots in the top right corner, open Cellular Data Use and choose Use Less Data.
4/11 See your Likes
It’s easy to lose track of your friends’ old posts on Instagram, but if you know you Liked it, you’ll be able to track it down easily. Just go to your profile, hit the three dots at the top and select Posts You’ve Liked. You can also save posts in a folder only you can see by tapping the bookmark icon underneath it. Take a look at everything you’ve bookmarked by tapping the same icon that sits near the top of your profile.
5/11 Find relevant hashtags
Everyone knows you can expand the reach of your posts by using a number of relevant hashtags, but what those are aren’t always glaringly obvious. You can easily find the right ones for you by typing a keyword into Instagram’s search bar, selecting a hashtag from the list and swiping along the Related row that appears at the top of the screen.
6/11 Clear your search history
Whatever your reasons are, you can clear your recent searches by going to your profile, hitting the three dots in the top right and selecting Clear Search History. To go a step further and hide your Suggested searches too, go to the search page, tap and hold the account you want to hide, and choose Hide from the pop-up window.
7/11 Hide photos you’re tagged in
Tagged photos on Instagram aren’t as prominent as they are on Facebook, but anyone can still browse through other people’s pictures of you by visiting your profile and tapping the photo of you icon. If you’re tagged in a picture you don’t want other people to see, go to your profile, hit the photos of you icon, tap the three dots at the top of the screen and choose Hide Photos.
8/11 Secure your account
Make your Instagram account much harder to hack by enabling two-factor authentication, a security feature that protects you even if your login details are stolen. Go to your profile, tap the three dots, open Two-Factor Authentication and toggle it on.
9/11 Share lots at once
If you want to upload a bunch of related pictures and videos without flooding everyone else’s feed, you can shared them all as one post. Hit the + icon, select Gallery, choose Select Multiple, pick out up to 10 of the pictures and clips you want, tap Next and reorder them by dragging and dropping.
10/11 Record hands-free
Instagram Stories has been a massive hit since it came out last year, but you might not know that you can record Stories clips without having to hold one of your digits on the record key. On the Stores screen, just swipe through the options at the bottom until you get to Hands-Free.
11/11 Edit posts after publishing
Most people know you can delete any of the images you’ve already posted, but not everyone is aware that you can also edit them. Instagram unfortunately doesn’t let you tinker with filters and effects, but you can change your original caption, tag people and update the location.
The Facebook-owned site has had a tough year of outages. In March, it – along with Facebook and WhatsApp – suffered one of the biggest failures in the history of the internet, when all three services went down at the same time for hours.
Problems were reported across the world, according to the monitoring website Down Detector. They were particularly bad in Europe, the US and Brazil, according to the site’s outage map, but that is probably just because most of its users are online in those countries.
The problems appeared to be affecting everybody who tried to use the app or the website. Instagram is accessed by some half a billion people every day, meaning that millions of people can be hit by even the shortest global outage.
Unlike Facebook and many other major services, Instagram doesn’t run an official page for checking on its server status. During particularly long outages it may opt to post from its Twitter feed, but it is yet to do so, with its most recent post showing a dog.
While it’s unlikely that the PSN and Instagram outages are linked, problems with the infrastructure underlying the internet can sometimes mean that apparently unrelated services go down simultaneously. At the beginning of the month, for instance, a problem at Google meant that services including Snapchat and YouTube went offline at the same time, for the same reason.
Parent company Facebook did see a spike in reports of problems on outage monitoring sites. But the number of complaints was much lower than would be expected if there was a significant problem, and it is likely that people are simply blaming Instagram’s parent company for the failures of the app.
