Instagram Outage Affects Thousands – What’s Behind Social Media Crash?

Key Takeaways

• Reports of Instagram, Facebook and Thread going down emerged on Tuesday, Oct. 8.
• The outage was short-lived and the issue appears to have been resolved.
• Meta has not explained what caused the downtime.
• Big Tech outages have affected users globally.

Meta’s social media platforms Instagram, Facebook and Threads suffered global outages on Tuesday, Oct. 8, with thousands of users globally reporting issues getting online.

Downdetector clocked a spike  in reports of downtime at around six am UTC when more than 3,000 people registered an issue and Issue with Instagram, while Facebook and Threads experienced similar but less pronounced emerges. Service appears to have been restored since then.

Instagram Goes Down

Ironically, when social media users encountered an error when trying to connect to Meta’s web and mobile apps, they turned to rival social media platform X to vent their frustrations, often using the hashtag #InstagramDown.

So far, Meta hasn’t offered any explanation for the outage. However, the “unexpected error” message users were shown when they tried to access the platforms suggests some kind of technical problem was to blame.

Meta’s Technical Issues

Considering that Meta’s infrastructure, which serves millions of users daily, requires constant updates and maintenance, a malfunction during one of these processes could well result in a temporary shutdown.

When Meta platforms experienced a more than two-hour outage on March 5, Meta Communications Director Andy Stone said  : “A technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services.” But he didn’t expand on the root cause.

Data Center Problems

The most significant Meta outage occurred in October 2021, when Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp experienced six hours of global downtime that was attributed  to a faulty configuration change in Meta’s data centers.

Following the crash, Meta engineers revealed that a routine update disrupted communications between data centers, making Meta’s services unavailable worldwide.

Microsoft Outage Affects Global Travel

Aside from social media, widespread system failures have caused much more severe consequences.

On Sept. 30, over 100,000 Verizon customers were unable to make or receive calls, with indications suggesting that some kind of software bug may have been be to blame.

In the most disruptive crash of recent years, a security update  affecting Microsoft’s Windows operating system caused thousands of flights to be cancelled, crashed global banking systems and cut live television services.

The widespread disruption caused by such incidences points to the innate weakness of the current centralized Big Tech paradigm for digital services.

With security and operational resistance in mind, there is rising interest in decentralized alternatives to traditional hosting and distribution models that don’t suffer from the same single points of failure. These include blockchain-based AI, software and social media platforms supported by a growing array of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePINs).