Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Many of the earliest Instagram videos have lost their sound. More than a year of videos posted to the platform are now silent, displaying an error that says “video has no sound” when you try to play their audio. The issue appears to affect videos posted before late 2014.
It’s hard to pin down exactly what’s going on, but here’s what we’ve noticed: it seems that videos posted from June 2013, when Instagram first added video, to October 2014 are now missing their audio. The audio isn’t working regardless of platform, whether the clip is played on desktop, iOS, or Android. And because this seems to affect most — if not all — videos in that timeframe, this appears to be an issue on Instagram’s end rather than some sort of takedown issue regarding copyrighted audio.
You can check out an example of the audio missing in a clip posted by Sam Sheffer, then The Verge’s social media manager, on the day Instagram first launched video. It turns out that in the embed below, the audio actually works, but it’s absent when you view the clip directly on Instagram.
For longtime Instagram users, no longer having audio on their older videos could be a big loss. Part of why people post on Instagram is to preserve moments in time, and audio is often a huge part of what might make a video special or memorable.
The issue seems to have started earlier this year. “Recently lost a good friend of mine and have videos of us on [Instagram] that I would like to hear him in,” one Reddit user wrote in June. Another user wrote in May that they lost sound on a video of their dog that passed away. Another said in May that they don’t have sound on old videos of their infant daughter.
We were tipped off to this unexpected issue thanks to a reader, and we’ve noticed this phenomenon with Verge staffers’ videos, too.
Meta says that it’s fixing the issue but didn’t provide a timeline for when it will be resolved. “We’re aware that a bug caused some people to have trouble accessing audio on older feed posts,” spokesperson Seine Kim tells The Verge. “The issue is being resolved, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
Update December 5th, 8:06PM ET: Noted that the included embed actually does have audio.
