Instagram confirms that its service is down for some people due to a ‘server issue’ [Update: now back]

UPDATE: About two hours after what appeared to be a worldwide outage, it looks like Instagram’s service has been gradually restored, at least in many areas of the US. At about 8:58 pm PT, images started to move through the stalled servers. There’s still no official word yet from Instagram, but the photo app has removed a tweet announcing problems on its service (as seen below), which should mean that the issues have been fixed.

Our original story follows.

If you had ideas about sharing your Friday evening or weekend pictures on Instagram with your friends, you were likely disappointed. The Facebook-owned photo app was down for some people, but Instagram told users that the team was working to get things right again.

We’re aware of a server issue affecting some people and are working on a fix. Thank you for your patience!

— Instagram (@instagram) June 7, 2014

Third-party monitoring service Down Detector notes that the outage started at around 10:00 pm ET so this is turning out to be quite a lengthy downtime. Many users have probably seen this message on their news feed in Instagram after realizing that their stream of photos hasn’t been populated in a while.

The outage seems to be mainly affecting the mobile version of Instagram, as the website still seems to work for many — but that only allows you to view photos. Attempting to upload photos on your mobile phone likely just presents a ‘failed’ result, as for many right now.

There’s no news from Instagram yet on what’s affecting the service, but we have reached out to Facebook and Instagram and will update with any response.

Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion back in 2012. It now has over 200 million monthly active users and more than 20 billion photos have been shared on the service to date. The last major outage was just in April, which Instagram put down to a ‘feed delivery issue.’

If you’re addicted to Instagram — like many out there — we recommend keeping an eye on the company’s Twitter account (@Instagram) for the latest updates, and reports on Twitter from users all over the world too.

Tweets about “Instagram down”