Instagram glitch leaves users unable to send direct messages

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Instagram’s chat service appears to be working incorrectly, with users unable to send messages.

It comes as other Facebook services, including Messenger, appear to be crashing.

Issues began around 9:30am today, according to Down Detector, with users experiencing issues with the news feed, stories, messaging, and posting.

As well as in the UK, users in Japan, Poland, France, and Belgium are experiencing outages.

It appears that the issue is mainly affecting users in Europe, but there has nbeen no statement from either Facebook or Instagram about the outage.

WhatsApp, which is also ran by Facebook, seems to be operating without issue.

“We are aware that some people are having trouble sending messages on Messenger, Instagram and Workplace Chat. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible", a Facebook company spokesperson told The Independent.

Facebook has taken action to merge the back-ends of its Instagram and Messenger platforms, so that users on one app can message users on another.

However, it was also recently met with an anti-trust lawsuit from 48 states in the US, arguing that the social media giant has been engaging in anti-competitive behaviour. As a result, WhatsApp and Instagram could potentially be separated from Facebook.