Instagram suffered a widespread outage on Wednesday morning, with more than 10,000 users flooding outage-tracking site Downdetector with reports of app failures and direct messages that refused to send.
Reports began spiking around 2:48 AM UTC, with complaints concentrated in major US cities including New York, Chicago, Washington, Phoenix, Dallas, Boston, and San Francisco. Users in Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela also reported disruptions.
At the peak of the outage, 71% of affected US users cited problems with the mobile app, roughly 19-20% reported server connection failures, and 5% said their feeds and timelines had stopped loading.
BREAKING: Instagram outage reported by users across the platform tonight, according to Downdetector pic.twitter.com/WtWnYDV72K
— Resist Wire (@ResistWire) March 11, 2026
The primary point of failure appeared to be Instagram’s direct messaging feature, with users turning to X and other platforms to confirm whether the outage was widespread. Many reported mid-conversation blackouts, with messages either failing to send or refusing to load.
Meta (Nasdaq: META), Instagram’s parent company, has not issued a public statement or acknowledged the disruption as of the time of writing. The cause of the outage has not been confirmed.
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