Instagram Error During Student Protest in Jakarta, Meta Speaks Out

Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia - Many netizens reported that Instagram was experiencing disruptions while a demonstration was still ongoing in the Bundaran HI area of Jakarta on Friday evening (12/6). The keyword ‘Instagram’ briefly became a trending topic on social media platform X.

The reports included netizens claiming they could not open comments or upload stories. Messages such as ‘couldn’t upload story’ and ‘waiting for connection’ appeared. Some also claimed their accounts were suddenly logged out and they could not log back in. Several users assumed the Instagram disruption was related to the ongoing protest.

When asked for comment by CNBC Indonesia, Meta’s representative in Indonesia referred to an official statement from Meta spokesperson Andy Stone via a post on X. “We are aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing our services. We are working to fix it,” Stone wrote on X on Friday evening at 21:11 WIB.

About an hour later, at 22:41 WIB, Stone provided an update that Meta’s services, including Instagram, were gradually recovering. According to the Downdetector site, there were reports of Instagram disruptions in Indonesia from 20:00 to 23:00 WIB, with the highest number of reports at 21:45, totalling 1,121 reports.

Citing Reuters, there were more than 62,000 outage reports for Facebook and over 8,000 outage reports for Instagram globally, according to Downdetector. Quoted from Channel News Asia, citing the StatusGator site, users in the Philippines, India, Australia, Canada, and the United States reported disruptions to several applications under the Meta umbrella.