UPDATED: Snapchat users reported problems accessing the app Wednesday, in what appeared to be an outage affecting multiple regions for more than three hours.
User reports of problems with Snapchat from across the U.S. started to surge at about 7:15 a.m. ET, according to uptime-monitoring site DownDetector. Many Snapchat users said they couldn’t post Stories or send messages.
The company’s support account on Twitter on Wednesday acknowledged the issues in a post, saying, “We’re aware that some Snapchatters are having issues using the app right now — hang tight, we’re looking into it!”
At 10:31 a.m. ET, the account gave the all clear, saying the problems were fixed.
In a separate incident, Facebook’s family of apps — including Instagram and WhatsApp — went down for more than six hours last week, one of the longest outages for the social giant in recent years.
Like virtually every other internet service, Snapchat has from time to time encountered technical problems that render its service inaccessible. In April 2020, for example, Snap was down for about six hours because of an outage of a component in the Google Cloud Platform, which also affected access to Gmail and Nest, according to Google.
Snapchat has been on a roll lately, with an average of 293 million daily active users as of the second quarter of 2021 — a gain of 13 million for the period, marking its best user growth rate in four years. For Q3, Snap projected the user base would hit 301 million DAUs worldwide, which would be a 21% year-over-year increase.
For some Snapchat users, the app is their primary form of communication with their friends. While Snapchat was out of commission, disgruntled Snapchatters took to (where else?) Twitter to vent about the outage and share memes about the situation.
When I realise it’s not my Wifi but that Snapchat is down again #snapchatdown pic.twitter.com/tHhNQ657Mw
— Satyam Tripathi (@hrithiktripathi) October 13, 2021
Me waiting for Snapchat to come back : pic.twitter.com/crUHMkfPWO
— 11:59 (@19oo97) October 13, 2021
Everyone running to Twitter to see if it’s not only their Snapchat bugging #snapchatdown pic.twitter.com/5Qz8CJUCbu
— Karl (@LFC__Karl) October 13, 2021