Instagram, the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook parent company Meta, has apologised after thousands of users globally were unable to access its service early on Monday morning, and blamed the outage on a technical issue.
Issues with the site started at 1.51am Gulf Standard Time, with more than 185,000 users reporting that they were unable to access Instagram at the peak of the outage, according to tracking site Downdetector.
The issues were resolved about two hours later, the site showed.
“Instagram is back! Sorry for the trouble – we had a brief outage earlier and resolved the issue that caused it,” the social media platform said on Twitter.
A technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Instagram, a Meta official said.
“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused.”
Instagram also faced a major disruption in October last year, but confirmed later that it had fixed the “bug” causing the issue.
The social media platform, which has more than two billion users per month, is planning to release a text-based app to compete with Twitter, Bloomberg reported.
The company is currently testing the project idea with celebrities and influencers, the report said, citing sources, and it may be launched as soon as June.
It is also reportedly preparing a Twitter rival for release this summer, the report said.
