Instagram Down: Users Worldwide Report DMs Not Working and Feed Issues

Thousands of Instagram users around the world reported problems on Wednesday after the Meta-owned social media platform appeared to suffer a major outage.

Many users said they were unable to send direct messages (DMs), refresh their feeds, or access certain features of the app. The disruptions quickly triggered a wave of complaints online as people tried to confirm whether Instagram was down.

According to outage monitoring site Downdetector, reports of problems surged sharply during the disruption. At the peak of the outage, more than 12,000 users had flagged issues with the platform.

Data showed that nearly 75 percent of complaints came from people using the Instagram mobile application, suggesting the problem was particularly affecting the app rather than desktop access.

Several major US cities recorded high numbers of outage reports, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, New York, and Washington.

Users in India also experienced technical problems, with over 1,300 reports logged during the peak period. Downdetector noted that the number of complaints was “significantly higher than the baseline,” indicating a possible widespread technical issue.

The most commonly reported problem involved Instagram direct messages failing to send or load. However, some users also reported additional issues, including feeds that would not refresh and profile pages that failed to open.

Others said their older chat histories temporarily disappeared, raising speculation that the platform may have been struggling with backend server connections.

As the disruption spread, many users turned to X to check whether others were experiencing the same issues.

Downdetector data also suggested that about 18 percent of reports were linked to server connection errors, further pointing to a technical fault within the system.

Despite the Instagram outage, other services owned by Meta Platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp, appeared to be functioning normally.

At the time of writing, Meta had not issued an official statement explaining the cause of the disruption.