8 Facts About the Instagram Outage That Happened This Afternoon

This afternoon, if your life goes as per usual, then power to you: your life isn’t controlled by something known as Instagram.

If your life was turned upside down for about an hour this afternoon, and you panicked because you thought your world has somehow ended and you feel like microwaving a kitten, then you’d have known about the Instagram outage that occurred earlier.

As of now, there’s no official announcement from Instagram on why there was a downtime, but read on and you’ll understand why it’s still news-worthy.

The Downtime

It started around 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., in which a visit to the website, regardless of whether you’re at a profile or just the homepage, would show a simple “5XX Server Error”.

In the app, it would not refresh, akin to moments when you log in to Instagram without an Internet connection.

The server came back online at around 4:00 p.m.

Affected Areas

No doubt Singapore is affected because everyone in the office panicked (pretty sure it was for work). However, other countries are affected as well: according to various sources, it affects people in Europe, the US, Australia, Malaysia, Japan and Indonesia.

And by the way, downdector.com is indeed a pretty nifty place to check if any online services are down, including ISP services. Once, I couldn’t connect to my Wifi and knew about Starhub’s outage almost immediately due to downdector.com.

Instagram’s Reply

So far, there has only been one standard reply: “We’re aware that some users are having trouble accessing Instagram. We’re working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

In other words, got say like no say.

But of course you’ve got to wonder: why is this news-worthy?

#FacebookDown & InstagramDown Are Pretty Common

Okay, not as common as fast food resturants coming out with new items, but it’s not uncommon. On early September, there was reportedly a brief 30-minute downtime, and earlier on May, there was one that lasted more than 30 minutes.

Anyone who uses Facebook or Instagram regularly for business would also know that there would be bugs in the system every now and then, which would always be resolved by themselves shortly (as in, their engineers worked on it lah, not the codes just Wolverined).

So, if such downtime is common, why the news?

Facebook, Which Owned Instagram, Just Suffered A Massive Data Breach

Lest you’re not aware, it hasn’t been a good year for Facebook: from the Cambridge Analytica issue to its founder’s grilling in a congressional hearing, Facebook is now on a path to recovery.

But it didn’t help when it’s revealed a week ago that hackers had exploited a bug in Facebook to gain limited access to almost 50 million users. The bug was in a feature called “View as”, in which users can use it to see how others would see your profile.

To counter the threat, the feature was disabled immediately and 90 million users were forcefully logged out from their account for security purposes. The hackers had stolen “access tokens”: think of them as access cards to your office. What Facebook did was to reset the “access cards” so the hackers who had the old cards can’t get into your office.

So far, Facebook said that their investigation shows that “investigation has so far found no evidence that the attackers accessed any apps using Facebook Login…we’re sorry that this attack happened — and we’ll continue to update people as we find out more.”

Scary, isn’t it?

But read on, because it gets more exciting.

Founders of Instagram Leave Facebook

Facebook isn’t just Facebook: It owns WhatsApp and Instagram, too. Earlier this year, the founder of WhatsApp left Facebook after the privacy scandal that rocked Facebook.

Then last week, a shocking announcement was made: the founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, suddenly wanted to leave Facebook. On the surface, this is what Kevin Systrom said: “We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again…Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what we plan to do.”

However, there were unverified rumours that the pair was frustrated with Mark Zuckerberg stepping in more regularly to set the direction of Instagram, as Facebook looks to rely more on Instagram for its growth.

Facebook Employee Adam Mosseri to Run Instagram

Guess what? Just yesterday, it was announced that Facebook employee Adam Mosseri would be coming in to lead the popular photo-sharing platform.

Coincidence? Well of course.

Funniest Tweets

There were many funny Tweets, but this one takes the cake:

Pretty sure there are more, but let’s just say that sometimes, when the authorities let their hair down, it’s just so darn cool.