The still-young social media upstart from Instagram had a big hiccup
(Image credit: Meta)
Threads, Instagram's popular alternative to the struggling X (formerly Twitter), went offline on Thursday afternoon around 1:30 PM ET but quickly regained its footing shortly after 2PM.
People trying to access the platform on either the desktop or the Threads app found blank screens and empty feeds. There was no indication that Instagram, with which Threads is somewhat tightly integrated, suffered any similar difficulties.
Downdetector.com, which tracks consumer complaints for online service outages, noted a sharp uptick in complaints starting at around 1:30 PM.
Threads launched last year and quickly skyrocketed to prominence and popularity. Since July, it's been slowly adding features that put it almost on a level playing field with rival X, which has been bleeding advertisers, and possibly users, since Elon Musk took over in late 2022.
We did take a glance over at X where "Threads Down" never trended, but some X users did report that they, too, could not access Threads.
This was the first significant outage for the social media platform since its launch. Perhaps it coincided with Threads testing out some major new features like the ability to save draft posts or add GIFs through the desktop.
TechRadar asked Instagram CEO and Threads overlord Adam Mosseri what happened and will update this post with his response.
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A 38-year industry veteran and award-winning journalist, Lance has covered technology since PCs were the size of suitcases and “on line” meant “waiting.” He’s a former Lifewire Editor-in-Chief, Mashable Editor-in-Chief, and, before that, Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for Ziff Davis, Inc. He also wrote a popular, weekly tech column for Medium called The Upgrade.
Lance Ulanoff makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Live with Kelly and Mark, the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNBC, CNN, and the BBC.