New post: AWS server issues take down Instagram, Airbnb, Flipboard
Original post:
If you want to Instagram another selfie or post a hilarious Vine video, it looks like you’ll need to wait as both Instagram and Vine are currently out-of-order.
It appears both social media hubs went down sometime around 1 p.m. PST. Both Vine.co and Instagram.com are down, as confirmed by Down For Everyone Or Just Me.
Facebook (which owns Instagram) still works, and Twitter (which owns Vine) is also working. Instagram has more than 100 million users, while Vine has 40 million.
I was actually trying to post a photo to Instagram a few minutes ago and got a little frustrated when it kept stalling, even after restarting my phone.
But there seem to be some people on Twitter — which is still up and running just fine — quite a bit more angry than me (see below).
Amazon.com went down for 40 minutes last week, presumably costing the Seattle online giant millions in sales. Two days before that, all of Google’s services went down for five minutes. The New York Times also went down for two hours two weeks ago, and GitHub also experienced outages.
We reached out to the companies and will update this story as we find out more about the outages.
Instagram & Vine are down. What am I going to do with my life now
— nikki (@ArianaGoofy) August 25, 2013
Vine is down…Instagram is down…being a man of the 21st century I'm kinda freaking out, I need my pre-church laugh!
— Aaron Smith (@aaron_smith4020) August 25, 2013
Is vine really down how the fuck how am I suppose to entertain myself for hours upon hours?
— Madison Stewart (@madisonjeanx_) August 25, 2013
MY VINE ISN'T WORKING EITHER WHAT IS HAPPENING
— mckenna (@mckennaa_j) August 25, 2013
My Instagram and vine aren't working wtf
— Itzel Trujillo (@uncooldallas) August 25, 2013
Update, 2:07 p.m. PST: Looks like Vine is back up and working. Instagram still down.
https://twitter.com/instagram/status/371736042425950208
Update, 2:28 p.m. PST: Here’s what Instagram sent us:
We’re experiencing an outage that is causing some Instagram users to have trouble loading their feeds. We are working on fixing the problem and hope to have full service restored soon.
Vine, which keeps going in and out, also just tweeted this:
We're aware of some issues affecting our servers and are working to address them now. Thanks for your patience and hang tight!
— Vine Creators (@VineCreators) August 25, 2013
Update, 2:43 p.m. PST: Instagram is working for me and a few others that have been tweeting about their good news. It appears to be coming back slowly for users. It’s nearly been two hours since it first went down.
Update, 3:50 p.m. PST: Looks like all this could be related to an AWS outage, as GigaOM points out here. Flipboard and Airbnb were also affected. The last big AWS outage happened Christmas Eve 2012.
You can see the AWS incident report from today’s outage here. Amazon said it a was due to faulty networking device:
The root cause was a “grey” partial failure with a networking device that caused a portion of the AZ to experience packet loss. The network issue was resolved and most volumes, instances, and API calls returned to normal. The networking device was removed from service and we are performing a forensic investigation to understand how it failed. We are continuing to work on a small number of instances and volumes that require additional maintenance before they return to normal performance.