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Instagram back up after second major outage of the week

Facebook started off the week with one heck of a blunder, watching all of its services go down worldwide for over six hours. Now, to close out the week, Facebook-owned Instagram had another large-scale outage that lasted multiple hours. People started to notice issues with Instagram not loading or refreshing around 2 p.m. ET, and the problems seemed to be sporadic — but a wave of reports made it clear there was a mojor problem.

Over on Twitter, both #instagramdownagain and #instadown were trending for the duration. That doesn’t happen for a small or short blip.

Instagram status on Downdetector
Downdetector

Though there were some reports of Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp being down, triggering comments from those who dealt with Monday’s issues, that ended up being more of a coincidence than anything noteworthy. Facebook confirmed the outage and referred to a “configuration change” as the culprit — though this was apparently a different configuration problem than what knocked everything out just a few days ago.

And that much was clear as we assessed the situation today. Unlike Monday’s whole-network outage, this problem with Instagram isn’t a complete blackout; some people were hit, and others had a relatively short delay in getting up-to-date content in their apps.

After the week Facebook just had, things can only get better, right?

Andrew Martonik
Andrew Martonik is the Editor in Chief at Digital Trends, leading a diverse team of authoritative tech journalists.
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