No, it's not your Wi-Fi: Instagram Reels are freezing and feeds are broken right now for some

Some Instagram users are stuck dealing with what seems to be a widespread glitch that is breaking the home feed and causing Reels to endlessly buffer.

Reports about these issues started cropping up late yesterday, and we’re still seeing more complaints surfacing today. Affected users are posting about the issue on Reddit and X, trying to figure out if it’s just them.

Well, it’s not.

People opening the Instagram app are mostly staring at a blank screen. Some users report seeing just one or two posts before the feed completely stops loading.

Things are not much better for those who can actually see content. Trying to watch videos just leads to constant freezing, making Reels virtually unwatchable. Even the audio clips attached to Instagram Notes are reportedly stalling out.

Over on X, users are questioning their Wi-Fi connections because every other app on their phone works perfectly. Others are just annoyed about why videos refuse to play without aggressive buffering.

The glitch is also weirdly selective. As one user noted, secondary accounts logged in on the exact same device might work just fine while the primary account is totally bricked.

Moreover, we’re seeing reports from all over the globe, including Brazil, Canada, and the US. So it rules out this being a localized outage.

Standard troubleshooting is not helping anyone. People have tried clearing their cache, restarting their phones, and reinstalling the app entirely, but it doesn’t seem to help.

There is a temporary fix floating around that actually seems to do the trick for now. Several users in a popular Reddit thread found that logging into Instagram through a mobile or desktop web browser forces the feed to wake up.

If you scroll through a few posts on the web version and then switch back over to the mobile app, the feed starts behaving normally again. It is not a perfect solution. A few people mentioned the mobile app breaks again as soon as they close their browser.

Meta has not put out a statement acknowledging the problem. Users are largely stuck waiting it out or keeping a Safari tab open just to trick the app into working.

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