Instagram restores service after brief worldwide outage

Instagram was briefly down worldwide on Friday, but services were restored after a 10-minute absence.

Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service. It allows users to take pictures and videos and share them privately or publicly on the app. It also enables them to do it through a variety of other social networking platforms.

It seems that the more popular an online service gets, the bigger the panic that sets in when there are interruptions. When Google Drive was down in October last year, people couldn’t access spreadsheets and documents – never mind vacation photos. Terrified users were shown the message “file does not exist”.

Similar panic grips people whenever Twitter goes down for a brief instant.

And everyone’s favorite social network Facebook has been down more times in the past couple of years than some care to remember. Although that tends to cause more comic outrage than real despair.