Instagram is down in several countries

Users of the social network Instagram complained about the failure of the service. According to Downdetector data, the problem mainly affected India, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and a number of other countries. The reasons for the incident are still unknown.

The crashes started around 8:15 GMT. 52% of users complained about the application, 23% about problems with the site, and another 25% could not connect to the service. It is noteworthy that from the entire Facebook ecosystem, problems have arisen only on Instagram – the main social network and the WhatsApp messenger are operating normally.

This is the second Instagram crash in the last month. In early August, users also complained about the unstable work of the social network – they had problems loading the feed and connecting to the service. Then the problems affected the inhabitants of Europe, Latin America, the USA and Russia.

A flurry of new reports are surfacing online, noting that Instagram is down and not working for many users.

Instagram has recently announced that now all users of the social network are required to provide their date of birth. According to the company, the new rules should “create a safer experience for young users”.

Instagram users who have not yet provided their date of birth will be prompted to correct this. Otherwise, Instagram will ask for the date of birth when launching the application; and if you do not specify it, the application will close. That is, users will be forced to disclose information about their date of birth; in order to continue using the social network. Instagram also plans to post alerts on certain posts and ask for a birthday before allowing viewing of sensitive content.

The age information will be used to create new security features that the company says will help ensure that a certain age group is given the “right experience” of using Instagram. Back in March, Instagram made changes to the social network to prohibit adults from sending messages to users under the age of 18; and last month the accounts of users aged 16 and under became closed by default.

Instagram is developing an artificial intelligence system to correctly estimate the age of users who enter the wrong date of birth. In the future, if Instagram technology does not agree with the age entered by the user, the social network will offer a number of options to check it.