Numerous Instagram users started complaining about frequent app crashes on a wide variety of devices over the last 24 hours, with such problems reportedly troubling the Galaxy S9, Galaxy S8, Pixel 2, and select Xiaomi smartphones. No apparent cause of the issue has yet been identified, with some affected individuals having luck with cleaning the app’s cache or reinstalling it entirely. Others report that doing either allows them to use Instagram with no problems on their first attempt but claim the crashes resume as soon as they return to the app, regardless of whether it stayed suspended in RAM or was manually closed from the “Recents” screen.
Facebook‘s subsidiary has yet to respond to the development in any capacity, with the newly emerged issue being widely speculated to be related to the app’s latest client-side update which started rolling out on Tuesday. The latest Android version of the social media platform didn’t debut with a changelog attached to it, making it unclear what aspect of the service Instagram ended up tweaking. Online reports about frequent crashes are presently in the thousands on other social media and aggregators such as Reddit, with Android users seemingly being the only ones affected by the newly introduces issue. A surge of one-star reviews is also observable on the Google Play Store, with almost all of them citing massive instability as their reason for existence.
User reports on Reddit are pointing to crashes also being observable on all devices running the latest developer preview of Android P, with some individuals claiming that installing the June security patch eliminated the problem. Instagram is likely to comment on the matter in a matter of days, as suggested by its support track record, especially its history of addressing major issues such as the newly emerged one. Users who aren’t able to circumvent the crashes in the meantime may want to attempt reverting back to the previous version of the app launched two weeks ago.