Is Instagram Inaccessible?

Instagram, without a doubt, is one of the most successful photo-sharing platforms out there. The social media channel houses a colossal user base, making it one of the top 4 social media networks across the world. In a recent announcement by Facebook, it was revealed the platform had around 1 billion monthly active users.

However, lately, Instagram has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Be it the platform’s inexplicable algorithm or a bug that resulted in the suspension of the account of several users. A few days back, Instagram fell victim to an outage followed by users reporting an account suspension error. It didn’t take long for the multinational technology conglomerate to fix the issue with the temporarily suspended accounts. However, the company didn’t shed any light on what caused the problem in the first place. According to downdetector.com, around 2,350 users had reported the glitch since 8 p.m. IST.

Moreover, before the incident, Facebook-owned WhatsApp suffered a major outage last week in India and globally. Due to the outage, the instant messenger and the web client were unavailable for more than 2 hours. Later, the company issued a notice saying WhatsApp was down due to configuration changes on the backbone routers.

Apart from suspension issues, several Instagram users were facing issues related to server connection. Instagram even took to Twitter to convey that it was due to a bug that some users were facing trouble accessing their accounts and seeing a temporary change in the follower count.

Given Instagram’s popularity, users aged 25 and over, spend around 24-29 minutes a day on average. Instagram has become the go-to platform for people under the age of 25, spending 32 minutes a day. Considering this, the average Instagram user under the age of 25 will spend over eight days a year on the platform.

No wonder an outage such as this would cause users a lot of inconveniences. From sharing life updates to keeping in touch with near and dear ones, social media has won a different place in the lives of people. People, on average, spend 1 hour and 15 minutes a day on social media. The average person aged 18 and above will spend nearly 19 days a year on social media. Social media has unarguably become an integral part of our lifestyle, and any disruption to these services would be troublesome to users.

Sahil Chopra

Guest Author Sahil Chopra is the CEO and Founder of iCubesWire, a leading Digital Marketing Solution and concept provider in India, providing a 360-degree environment to leading brands for their digital marketing needs. He is a highly motivated and adaptive digital marketing professional and internet evangelist with expertise in Internet Strategy development and execution. Sahil has over 9 years of experience in digital marketing across multiple traditional and emerging channels. Sahil completed his engineering from PTU and pursued an MBA from Symbiosis Thereafter he started his career with NIIT – Global E-learning Services where he was exposed to the concept of digital marketing.