Ryan Lau | @agorisms

As of Monday at 7:40 PM, EST, many individuals worldwide are reporting that Instagram is down. When users try to use the site, they are able to access previously loaded posts. This, however, is because of the fact that these posts are downloaded on the users’ devices. Users report being unable to refresh their content or view any new posts.

With Instagram down across North America and the world, it is unclear when the outage will correct itself. The company has yet to make an official statement on the matter. As of 7:30 PM, an outage website had reported more than 5,000 outages. That number will only steadily increase until the company resolves the issue.

This is not the first time in recent history that major social media networks have faced outages. Just last November, YouTube’s servers were unexpectedly down for an extended period of time. Thus, both Google and Facebook have dealt with major shutdown issues in a short span.

Instagram Down: Updates

7:55 PM, EST: No reports of change. Down Detector reports that the outages are most frequent in the Northeastern and Southwestern United States. However, these are also two major population centers. Thus, it is possible that these areas have simply reported the outage, whereas other locations have not done so with great frequency yet. Some smaller pockets of outage reports include Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Wales, and Central Europe.

8:02 PM, EST: #instagramdown and #instagramoutage are garnering thousands of posts on Twitter. The site has still not released an update. It is unclear whether we will see Instagram down for an extended period of time.

8:18 PM, EST: Some reports are beginning to clear up. Particularly, users have had success viewing direct messages. However, other users still report outages, particularly in the United States.

8:28 PM, EST: Reports state that Instagram is now properly functioning. The shutdown lasted for about an hour.

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