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Instagram went down for two hours Saturday morning, leaving some morning Internet users in the lurch for their Internet photograph sharing needs. What were Angelenos to do while trying to post from the Grilled Cheese Invitational? The Los Angeles Times Book Festival? Coachella?
The site went down around 9 a.m., but a ray of hope appeared for those wishing to share their overheated concert selfies as the site returned around 10:30 a.m. — but only briefly, as they apparently continued to work through site problems. The site appeared to be back shortly after 11 a.m., but Instagram was yet to declare themselves officially out of the woods.
When Instagram went down, when you tried loading an Instagram photo on a desktop computer, you got a "504 Gateway Time-out." When you tried to load the homepage, you were given a screen with — ironically enough for Instagram — a broken image link. It was accompanied by this message:
"Sorry, we couldn't complete your request. Our team has been notified and will investigate as soon as possible."
Later in the morning, that was replaced by yet another error message.
In the iPhone app, the home screen wouldn't update, trying to load some other pages delivered a "couldn't refresh feed" message and trying to pull up favorites delivered the same message as the website.
Instagram tweeted that the service was down to what it termed "a feed delivery issue," but later deleted their tweet.
While Instagram asked for patience, many on Twitter didn't seem to have much. Some influential users tweeted about the outage, including one who took credit:
Other users shared their jangled nerves:
This story has been updated.