On April 6, Meta's API began returning 500 errors when we tried to create media containers for Instagram image posts. This was an issue on Meta's side - their servers were rejecting valid image publishing requests with internal errors. The problem had been showing up intermittently since February, but spiked sharply starting April 1, with April 6 being the worst day by volume. Threads publishing was also affected.

Some customers were unable to publish image posts to Instagram and Threads through Buffer. Posts that included images would fail with an error. Text-only posts and other platforms were not affected. The issue was most severe on April 6 and gradually improved over the course of April 7, with success rates returning above 98% by the morning.

We spotted the spike through our monitoring and declared an incident right away. After confirming the 500 errors were coming from Meta's API (not something on our end), we posted an update to our status page and put up a Help Center banner so customers would know what was going on.

We submitted both a bug report and a direct support request to Meta. From there, it was a matter of monitoring - our team kept watch overnight with handoffs across timezones to make sure customers stayed informed. By the morning of April 7, success rates had restored and we resolved this incident.

This was the third time we've dealt with Meta's Instagram publishing API returning 500 errors - the pattern has been recurring since February. We're also looking at ways to improve how quickly we detect these spikes so we can get the word out to customers faster when it happens again.