Instagram down: App and site not working as Facebook also hit by problems

Feed refusing to load and server errors being shown to users

(iStock)

Instagram appears to have stopped working properly, with people unable to refresh their feed and being hit by server errors.

The problems come shortly after issues at parent company Facebook. Users said they were unable to use the site's ad manager, which allows them to send paid-for posts.

Affected Instagram users saw that the feed would not refresh, meaning that new posts or stories did not show up on the app.

Pulling on the feed to try and force it to refresh simply brought the loading graphic, and no new posts would show up.

Users attempting to access the site through its desktop version were also hit by issues, including a server error message.

Tracking website Down Detector reported a vast number of issues, with Twitter also flooded by people saying they were unable to use Instagram properly.

Problems were particularly focused on the US and Europe, the site showed, though that might simply be a result of where most Instagram users are trying to get online.

Instagram does not have a server status page like many other large websites, and so there is no way to check if it was aware of the problems. It's official Twitter account sometimes posts updates on outages, but had not sent an update at the time of publication.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all owned by the same company, and rely on shared infrastructure. That has meant that in the past an outage at one service brought about problems across the board, but WhatsApp appeared to be working as normal while only Facebook's sponsored posts service seemed to be having issues.