There is a certain modern sort of anxiety that strikes when you pull down on your phone screen to refresh your feed, and the spinning wheel… keeps spinning. It dangles before you, taunting you, and then issues the anodyne, portentous ruling: “Something went wrong.” Yesterday, this wasn’t merely a hit-and-miss Wi-Fi for some: It was a full-blown digital blackout that swept three continents and had users from India to the United States to Europe staring at frozen screens.
The Glitch Anatomy
When an app as big as Instagram goes down, it’s not normally a case of one wire being unplugged. More typically, it is a series of complex failures. Users shared different symptoms: Some were being logged out of the app and were unable to log back in, while others could open the app but saw only cached (old) images from days earlier. The “feed refresh” error is like punching the buttons to turn on the tap in your bathroom and hearing your pipes groan as no water comes out. The infrastructure is in place, but the flow is disrupted.
This particular outage seems to be associated with a back-end server update. Tech companies like Meta are always refreshing the code that exists on their vast server farms — the physical computers that house your photos and likes. Usually, these updates happen invisibly. They use a method called “rolling updates”: They update a few servers at a time, so no one notices. But if a bug creeps into that code, it can spread like an infection through the network and cause the servers to reject user requests in order to protect the integrity of the data.
The Scale of Dependency
The significance of this outage isn’t meant to be downplayed by being just a technical issue, but an issue with some social consequences. It’s an annoyance for the average teen. But for the creator economy — influencers, small businesses selling through DMs, brands operating time-sensitive campaigns — an outage is counted in lost revenue. “Think about a shop owner trying to open up the shop in the morning, and suddenly, when they stick their key into the door, it doesn’t work anymore. That is what a login rejection feels like to a business using Instagram as its de facto storefront.
The outages were reported everywhere, but India — one of Meta’s biggest markets — experienced a huge surge in reports on sites that track outages such as DownDetector. The grumbles weren’t just about boredom; they were about availability. When so much of our communication comes to be mediated through one platform, a hiccough in a data center in California or a routing error at an Asian server can send tremors out that will affect the operation of a bakery in Mumbai as well as the life of a fashion blogger in New York.
The Fragility of the Cloud
We think of the “cloud” as this ethereal, indestructible entity. In truth, it’s more just millions of hard drives spinning in hot rooms connected by fiber optic cables. It’s material, and it can break. Here’s what you’re seeing behind “Something went wrong”: The app saying to itself, “I can’t talk to the mothership.”
This is a strong reminder of the internet’s centralization. A bug in Meta’s ecosystem doesn’t just crash Instagram; it frequently crashes Facebook and WhatsApp as well, though in this case, the destruction seemed isolated. Behind the scenes, as engineers frantically “roll back” the update — pretty much hitting undo on the server changes — service begins to crawl back. First, you may be able to log in, but stories won’t load. Then the feed is working, but DMs are down. It is the slow resuscitation of a digital behemoth.
