UPDATE: April 24, 2017, 2:39 p.m. EDT Instagram reps have confirmed that the service outage has been fixed.
You're not alone: Instagram went down shortly this afternoon on both web and mobile. Believe it or not, sun stayed in the sky, time didn't stand still, and the world continued to turn.
We noticed the mobile version of the site was struggling shortly after 1:30 p.m. EST, and confirmed the web version of the photo sharing service was down as well.
We also saw this error message:
Credit: screenshot/instagramTwitter was predictably filled with frantic users reacting to the outage, desperately hoping to confirm that they weren't the only ones left out in the dark.
Tweet may have been deleted
Tweet may have been deleted
Tweet may have been deleted
Instagram acknowledged to us that it was aware of the issue and working on a fix, and pointed us to its tweet updating desperate users on the outage, which has since been deleted. We can talk trash about Twitter all we want, but when a service crashes, it's the first place to go for confirmation.
We know some Instagrammers are experiencing issues with the app. We're working on a fix!
— Instagram (@instagram) April 24, 2017
Instagram reps confirmed to us via email that service is back up and running for all users, but didn't share any further details when asked what caused the outage. That's OK, though -- we're sure everyone is too busy updating their Stories after the time spent offline to care.