Instagram and Facebook Messenger down as thousands report issues

Two of Meta's most popular apps have crashed, with thousands reporting that they can't access Instagram or Facebook Messenger.

More than two thousand people have reported outages with Instagram, according to downdetector.co.uk.

According to the same website, a spike has also been reported when it comes to accessing Facebook Messenger.

Meta, which runs the two apps, hasn't commented on the issue yet.

According to those reporting issues, people are having trouble sending direct messages, or DMs, to other users on Instagram.

"MY DM'S ARE NOT WORKING! As in I can't see anything or open a new one," one user wrote.

A second said: "Ignored your DM? No, I didn’t! Instagram is down."

And a third said there was other issues, writing: "Anyone else experiencing issues with typing? It was fine last night, but now I'm trying to make posts and the keyboard is glitching out only on this app.

"I cleared the data, the cache, restarted my phone... it's easily solved by typing slower, but I have other things to do besides makes posts and this is annoying."

Most people have reported issues with the app, while others said they couldn't share posts or upload.

When trying to send DMs, users say they are being hit with a message saying 'failed to send message. Try again?'. When they try again, they get the same issue.

More than 33 million people use Instagram in the UK, with it officially the most popular app in India, the US, Brazil, Turkey, and Indonesia.

The issue has been ongoing since around 11.30am, with people still having problems with the photo and video sharing app.

As is usually the case when social media apps go down, users have flocked to rival platforms to ask if it is also not working for them.

In this case, people have been posting on Elon Musk's X (formerly known as Twitter) to say they have been having issues with the Meta service.

The exact number of people impacted by this outage is not known, with DownDetector working on the basis of people reporting issues with a service.

Earlier on in 2024, hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users were impacted across the world for more than two hours as a result of an outage that was caused by a technical issue on Meta's side.

At its peak, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according DownDetector.