On Thursday, March 9, 2023, Instagram was down for thousands of users globally, according to Downdetector, an outage tracking platform.
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Background
Meta-owned Instagram suffered an outage on March 9, 2023, that has affected thousands of users globally. According to Downdetector, more than 46,000 users were affected globally as the prominent photo-sharing application was down late Wednesday.
The United States comprised the most affected portion of users, with around 2,000 users who reported issues while using the Meta-owned Instagram, followed by India and Australia with 1,000 affected users. The app has been adding several new features over the past few months and was reportedly testing a new feature to facilitate comments on posts with animated images, or GIFs.
On Thursday, the users of the application reported hassles in posting the content, logging in, and accessing certain features of the Meta Platform’s (META.O) Instagram. The service was restored after several hours of frustration for the users. The actual cause of the outage is not yet clear, whether it was due to a technical glitch on the application’s end or to any other supplementary factors.
Almost 20% of the reported outages were due to login problems, and 50% of the reported outages involved server connections. The outrage graph generated by the Downdetector showed a leap and bound in the reports at 7 a.m. on Thursday.
A Single Engineer Brought Down Twitter
Following the takeover of Twitter by the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, the app faced outage multiple times. More than half of the workforce of Twitter has been fired, leaving only one employee to handle the APIs of the microblogging platform. The app was down for many users on Monday, March 6, 2023.
A section of users faced issues with the links and images not being loaded, and some users were unable to see the tweets of other users. Clicking on the links displayed an error message that read “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information”, rather than redirecting the user to the linked address.
Few users also faced glitches with the Twitter-owned client for professional users, TweetDeck. Responding to the outage of Twitter, the official support account tweeted and clarified that some unintended consequences had been reflected due to an internal change and the team is working on it. Later, the prime reason for the outrage was revealed to be a mistake by the engineer who was alone responsible for handling the API of the platform.
In accordance with the reports of the Platformer, these internal changes were related to the project of the microblogging platform to shut down free access to its APIs. In February 2023, the company announced that it would terminate its free access services to its APIs to replace them with a paid version instead.
Downdetector
Downdetector is an online platform developed to track service outages by modulating the status reports from several sources. These sources include the errors submitted by the user on its platform, the comment section of each webpage of a site on Twitter and Downdetector and a few more. The platform facilitates the users with real-time information about the status of different services and websites in accordance with the outrage reports of the users. Founded by Tom Sanders and Sander van de Graaf in April 2012, Downdetector was acquired by Ookla in August 2018 and is available in 45 countries, with distinct sites for each country.