Instagram down: Thousands of Australians unable to use Insta on Thursday following reports of app crashes

Social media users desperate to see what their friends ate for breakfast or what their favourite influencer wore to the shops were having a meltdown Thursday with the news Instagram was down.

Thousands of Australians have been affected by the outage said to be a “technical issue” by the company’s PR team.

The website downdetector.com.au showed two spikes of outage reports - one at 10am followed by another at 11am.

The most common problems users are reporting include issues with the app, server connection and login problems.

Instagram users took to Twitter to report the outage with hundreds populating the hashtag #instagramdown.

@InstagramComms the app’s PR team have apologised for the outage.

“Earlier tonight, a technical issue caused people to have trouble accessing Instagram,” the account posted.

“We resolved this issue for everyone as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience. #instagramdown.”

Australian Google search trends also showed a massive spike in the search term: Instagram down.

“Down Detector”, “is Instagram down Australia” and “down time” also experienced a spike in searches.

The Northern Territory led the search, followed by Victoria and New South Wales.

The platform has been plagued by problems recently with Instagram and Facebook messenger both crashing on February 9.

That issue left users unable to post stories or in-feed posts to Instagram.

There were also issues on Facebook with sending messages and other problems.

At the time, Meta blamed a “technical issue”.

On Wednesday, Meta led the news with reports there were plans to lay off thousands of employees this week.

Its workforce saw a 13 per cent reduction in November 2022, in a bid to become a more “efficient” organisation.

This appears to be a common theme across the tech world.

During last month’s Instagram crash, social media users weren’t able to flock to Twitter to air their grievances as that app was also experiencing issues.

When trying to post, Twitter users received the message “you are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.”

That bug came following the roll-out of owner Elon Musk’s latest update to allow select users to post 4000-character long Tweets.