Instagram Outage Sparks Wave of Jokes Thursday Evening

On Thursday evening, around 7 p.m. ET, a number of reports began to pour in that Instagram was having an outage. Just over 30 minutes later, the number of Instagram issues reported to DownDetector.com was north of 26,000.

According to a breakdown from the Indy Star, 70% of the reports cited that the popular social media application wasn't working correctly. The widespread issues impacted Instagram but did not appear to have the same impact on Facebook, which is also owned by Meta.

Not surprisingly, with Instagram down for roughly two hours for some users, the jokes began to pour in on other social media platforms, specifically X.

Everyone running to X(Twitter) to see if Instagram is down 😅#instagramdown
pic.twitter.com/6fvphSyQ7l

— no (@kawaibabi) March 20, 2025

Instagram is down pic.twitter.com/x9naV2W70U

— veggies (@asapveggies) March 20, 2025

Instagram goes down like once a month

— Angelito (@_brndy) March 20, 2025

I have tasted Instagram. I have tasted Twitter. I have tasted Tiktok. I highly recommend reading a book.

— oZ 🍉 (@notyourdawgie) March 17, 2025

Everybody when Instagram was down pic.twitter.com/a7mHyeHS2x

— Hoodville (@Hoodville_) March 20, 2025

While the outage most impacted Instagram users, Facebook received roughly 500 reports by 7:30 p.m. ET. Interestingly, even a non-Meta website, Reddit, began reporting issues around the same time, checking in close to 500 reports.

This led some to believe that the errors and issues were more widespread than Meta products. There's been no update regarding what may have caused the outage, but at around 9:05 p.m. ET, Instagram was mostly back to normal based on the reports.

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