Why your Instagram messages are disappearing and five possible fixes

February 2024 · 3 minute read

Instagram is down – again!

Just last week, users were experiencing a whole range of different issues concerning Stories.

Stories were appearing blurry, upside down and the camera button disappeared, leaving users very frustrated.

Now, the app appears to be having even more issues, but this time it’s DMs that are down.

Read on to find out what’s going on and explore some potential fixes…

Instagram DMs are disappearing

On Tuesday, Twitter became flooded with reports that Instagram DMs are down for both iPhone and Android users across the globe.

According to Down Detector, the problems began at around 4 pm on Tuesday (July 5th) and are continuing into Wednesday.

Instagram users are claiming that DMs aren’t loading properly, are failing to send and are even disappearing completely.

Some aren’t able to access the app’s messaging feature at all whilst others are simply unable to reply to their friend’s DMs.

Many are receiving a DM notification but when they go to the messaging section, the message is gone and doesn’t show up at all.

One person wrote on Twitter:

Am I the only with disappearing DMs on #Instagram????? I’m literally not recieving msgs. It’s also so laggy and glitchy. #instagramdown

— Ayah Almnajed (@Ayah_Almnajed) July 5, 2022

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Another said:

Am the only one who's Instagram DMS are suddenly disappearing? I've been getting notifications and when I open the chat there's nothing there :/

— Clara ♡♮𖧷 (@claarachwe) July 6, 2022

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A third person added:

https://twitter.com/Poshberry01/status/1544367329303306242

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It appears to be a bug

At the time of writing this, Instagram hasn’t addressed the issues. However, your direct messages are acting strangely due to a bug within the app.

With over a billion users worldwide, outages are common and Instagram often goes down for users across the globe.

In 2022, Instagram bugs seem to be more common than ever and the app is having outages almost every week at the moment.

There is nothing wrong with your phone or WiFi, Instagram’s servers are simply down which is causing frustrating errors on your account. 

It’s really irritating, but unfortunately, there’s not much you can do. As with all internet glitches, there’s no quick fix to make your app work again.

Instagram’s tech team are likely to already be aware of the issue and working on fixing the app. So, it should be working as normal again in a few hours. 

However, if you’re feeling impatient, find some things that could fix your app below.

trying to reply to instagram dms rn is an olympic sport why do they keep disappearing

— mil (@millieelisa) July 5, 2022

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Five potential fixes

First, try completely shutting down your app. On an iPhone, do this by swiping up on your homepage.

Some users have reported that logging out of the app and then logging back in again has fixed their Instagram.

You could also try deleting your app and then re-downloading it again from the App Store.

are y’all DMs disappearing on instagram? or showing notifications and then when you click it there’s nothing new in the conversation?

— naira 🇳🇬❄️ (@supernaira) July 5, 2022

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Head to your App Store and make sure there are no Instagram updates available.

It’s the oldest trick in the book, but sometimes all you need to do is turn your phone off and on again.

If none of these things work, Instagram seems to be working as normal on the web, so you can access your account via a browser until the app is fixed.

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