Instagram just got a new CEO this week after the fairly controversial exit of its founding duo and it is underfire for a major security issue. The last thing it needed is an outage — but that’s exactly what happened today.
Between the hours of midnight and 1am at Facebook HQ, issues preventing the service from working on both the web and its apps, according to Down Detector. We here at TechCrunch were unable to access it in parts of Europe and Asia, and the issue appeared to impact many beyond those countries and, potentially, all users.
Facebook acknowledged the issue with a statement just before the service came back online:
“We’re aware that some users are having trouble accessing their Instagram accounts. We’re working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
With over one billion users worldwide, even just an hour is a pretty huge incident for the service.
You’d be forgiven for being worried. Facebook just suffered a huge hack which impacted at least 50 million accounts although, so far, the company has said it didn’t spread to Instagram, WhatsApp or services that use the Facebook login system.
We’ve reached out to Facebook and Instagram to see if there are more details on what happened.
In the meantime, here are some tweets: