The app and website appeared to be back to normal for most users just after 7 p.m. ET.
An Instagram spokesperson later confirmed that the interruption had ended, saying in a statement, "Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing their Instagram accounts. We are now fully recovered and apologize for the inconvenience."
Around 6 p.m. ET Thursday, #InstagramDown began to trend on Twitter as users noted the Facebook-owned app seemed to be experiencing an outage. Many users reported seeing a "Could not refresh feed" message when they attempted to reload the Instagram app on their phone. We received a similar message trying to access the app from Southern California.
[Ads /]
During the same period, Instagram's website also returned a "5xx Server Error" message and a generic Facebook error message when accessed on a desktop computer.
Down Detector, a website where users can submit outage reports, lit up during the interruption with more than 50,000 Instagram outage reports. The service's live outage map included reports from all over the world.
[Ads /]
Instagram and sister services Facebook, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp experienced a nearly day-long outage in some areas in March that Facebook said resulted from a "server configuration change."