Instagram's app has been down or suffering extremely long loading times for some over the last 50 minutes. Many suspect the reason is that Justin Bieber posted a complimentary photo of his ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez (seen above) to his 14 million followers. The post sent his fandom into a frenzy of rumors that they might be getting back together, which may have caused an outage-inducing traffic spike.
When I say the downtime could be Bieber's 'fault', what I really mean is that his fans are so loyal and engaged, they can create unpredictable floods of attention that can cripple web services.
The outage comes just a week after Facebook's other big acquisition WhatsApp experienced multiple hours of downtime caused by 'server issues'. There's been no official announcement posted by Instagram's blog, Facebook, or Twitter today, though.
However, people began tweeting 'Is Instagram Down? starting around 7:54am PST. Some users said they were getting service back around 8:15am but others continue report they can't upload photos or load their feed.
We've asked Facebook and Instagram for comment and are awaiting a response.
If Bieber was in part responsible, it highlights just how much sway big public figures have over web traffic. Once upon a time, it was record labels and movie studios that could say 'Hey kid, want to be famous?' But now, social platforms can allow anyone with powerful content, even if it only appeals to a certain demographic, to gain tens of millions of followers and impact the Internet landscape.
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