Twitter this morning:
This morning we noticed that Instagram’s short URL, Instagr.am, wasn’t resolving. Needless to say, Insta-fans were not happy. While hundreds of people were reporting the issue on Twitter, our engineering team had a quick fix in place. We quickly tested and deployed a DNS adjustment that ensures OpenDNS users can access Instagr.am links without issue until they get their domain back up and running.
In order to provide a temporary fix for the issue, we created a “false” answer that provides two IP numbers that have been recently used by insagr.am. This ensures all lookups of “instagr.am” are just mapped to Instagram servers and are correctly resolved.
For unknown reasons, the Armenian chapter of ISOC which handles .am domain registrations removed the domain. Could be a mistake, a billing issue, a technical glitch or something else. That said, this morning’s issue speaks to the risk of using country code Top Level Domains for such critical services when it might not be straightforward in getting it fixed or resolved.
Update: It looks like Instagram is now using full URLs for Tweets and Facebook posts in order to mitigate the issue.
Update 2: Facebook reports that the .am issue has been resolved.
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