Here’s how to find out whether any Snapchat connectivity issues you may be experiencing are local to you or affecting more users across a wider area. And more importantly, how to fix them.
Snapchat’s ephemeral messaging means you never need to worry about the composition of your snaps or the quality of your video, letting you instead focus on connecting with the people you care about. It’s the reason why, when the service does go down or stop working, it’s so frustrating.
How to check whether Snapchat is down
Snapchat doesn’t have a publicly-visible service status indicator like mobile networks do, so instead:
Check-in with a third-party service like DownDetector. The site even includes a live outage map to highlight any hotspots relating to reports of Snapchat being unavailable or functioning incorrectly.
Hop on over to Twitter. Snapchat has an official support account – @SnapchatSupport – which not only responds to users’ specific queries and issues, but also posts about wider reports of outages when they occasionally occur (and when they’re fixed).
Check out #SnapchatDown on Twitter too – it’s the unofficial hashtag that Snapchat users experiencing issues tend to use and using Twitter’s search filter tools can also help localise any outages based on time and location.
Related: Is Houseparty safe?
What to do if Snapchat is only down for you
If no other users are reporting issues, there’s been no acknowledgement of problems directly from Snapchat and the likes of DownDetector report that all systems are operational, then there’s a strong chance any Snapchat issues you might be experiencing are local to you and your device. Thankfully, there are still a few simple actions you can take that might rectify the situation.
1. Close Snapchat and restart it
First things first, close Snapchat on your phone, by which we mean, exit out of the app and kill the application fully. You can usually do this by opening your app switcher (tap the square navigation button at the bottom of the screen or swipe up and hold on Android) and swiping Snapchat up to dismiss/close it. Then open Snapchat again and see if the issues you were experiencing persist.
2. Update Snapchat
Head to the Play Store, the App Gallery or the App Store (depending on your phone) and search for app updates. You might simply be running an out-of-date release of Snapchat that is no longer fully functional.
3. Restart your phone
“Hello, I.T. Have you tried turning it off and on again?” – it’s a cliche but restarting your phone may be all that’s needed to free up your phone’s memory and have things running as intended once more.
4. Check your connection
Make sure that the WiFi network you’re connected to is itself connected to the internet. If you’re currently using mobile data, make sure you have a fast enough and strong enough network connection. For example, one ‘bar’ of 5G is useless compared to full ‘bars’ of 3G or 4G connectivity.
If you’re using a VPN or have a connectivity profile installed on your phone, try temporarily disabling and see if Snapchat starts behaving.
5. Check Snapchat’s app permissions
Head into your phone’s settings menu and look for Snapchat’s app permissions. There’s a chance that its access to your phone’s location or data is disabled, preventing it from working correctly.
6. Clear Snapchat’s cache
Either by digging around in your phone’s app settings menus, as in the previous tip or by going through Snapchat itself, clearing its cache directly may be the answer. From within Snapchat open up your profile, tap on the settings option or ‘cog’ icon and scroll down to the ‘Clear cache’ option.
7. Contact Snapchat Support
If all else fails, you can always pose your problem to Snapchat directly, either by contacting the support account Twitter mentioned earlier or by going to Snapchat’s dedicated support pages. Good luck!
