SAN FRANCISCO – Popular social media platform Instagram was down for thousands of users on March 21, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.

More than 6,000 users reported issues with accessing the photo-sharing platform in the United States at the peak of the outage, Downdetector’s data showed.

This was at about 8.20am Singapore time on March 22, with the local version of the website showing 500 reports here.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

Meta, which owns the platform, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The latest disruption comes roughly two weeks after a global one affected Instagram and Facebook on March 5.

Hundreds of thousands of users were affected in that outage, which lasted more than two hours, with many unable to log in after being booted out of the social media platforms.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a post on X that the outage was due to a technical issue, but did not elaborate on its nature.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” he said then. REUTERS