Instagram down: App stops working properly as users unable to post photos and videos

Instagram has stopped working amid a huge Facebook outage.

Both parent company Facebook as well as sibling company WhatsApp are both having strange issues at the same time, users report.

On Instagram – just like those other apps – the issues appear to be limited only to a specific part of the site. Users report that their feed might load, but that it is not possible to post anything new into it.

Doing so brings up an error message indicating that "Photo Can't Be Posted", according to users experiencing the problems.

Issues were particularly focused on the east coast of the US, according to the tracking website Down Detector. But they were reported across the world, with significant numbers of reports also coming from Europe, South America and East Asia.

Last time all three of Facebook's major services broke, the outage lasted for many hours. It later blamed that problem on a server issue that had a knock-on effect on Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as Facebook, since the three use shared infrastructure.

"As a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services," Facebook posted on Twitter after that previous outage was fixed. "We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience."

When those problems happened in March, they were said to be perhaps the biggest outage in the history of the internet, hitting millions of people.

“By duration, this is by far the largest outage we have seen since the launch of Downdetector in 2012,” Tom Sanders, co-founder of Downdetector, told Techcrunch in the wake of that outage. “Our systems processed about 7.5 million problem reports from end users over the course of this incident. Never before have we such a large scale outage.”