DMs on Instagram down as number of users reporting issues spikes by 56,000%

Instagram users worldwide reported issues with their direct messages on Wednesday morning (March 11).

People took to other social media platforms to complain that their messages to friends weren't sending.

According to DownDetector, which provides real-time service status information, the issues began in the early hours of the morning for US users.

More than 13,000 people flagged problems at its peak, with three-quarters of complaints coming from app users.

Reports of issues spiked by 56,000 percent above baseline level of complaints, according to the data.

DownDetector's outage map signalled that several US cities had flagged issues, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, Washington and New York.

Some 1,300 reports were lodged in India at its peak, too.

People took to the r/Instagram community on Reddit to see if anyone else was experiencing difficulties.

"Is it just my phone or [are] y'all having the same problem? 'Failed to load earlier messages' DMs not working," one user asked.

"Okay same here I’m so annoyed," one person responded. "I was just sending reels back and forth and not only can I not send them, I cannot see what I'm being sent. Annoying."

"This is weird!! Hope it gets fixed soon!! None of my messages are sending," a second said.

"For a moment, I thought they blocked me for no apparent reason," a third added.

The discussion spilt over onto Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, too.

"Am I trippin or Instagram trippin... dms won't load or send or refresh," one user said, as a second said: "What's up with Insta DMs?" along with a screenshot of an error message.

what’s up with insta dms pic.twitter.com/XEEkw31op5

— shaun (@dumpsters0up) March 11, 2026

According to DemandSage, Instagram has 3 billion monthly active users and more than 500 million daily active users.

India has the largest user base, with 413.8 million people on Instagram, while 171.7 million people in the US use the popular social networking app.

WhatsApp and Facebook, which are owned by Instagram's parent company Meta, appear to be working fine.

Meta has not yet addressed the reported issues with Instagram's direct messaging.

UNILAD has reached out to them for comment.

All this comes months after parts of the internet were disrupted by a Cloudflare outage.

Sites including X, Facebook and Letterboxd were among those impacted during the November 18 hiccup.

Ironically, even DownDetector was affected, so people couldn't even check if the issue was just their internet playing up, or the rest of the world too.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the issue was not caused 'by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind,' but was instead triggered by a change to one of the company's database systems' permissions.

Another outage hit a few weeks later, disrupting sites including Canva, Zoom and LinkedIn.