5 Solutions to Instagram Video Not Playing on iPhone

Updated May 10,2018 | by Cody

Instagram allows you to record and share your favorite moments with images and videos. With its increasing popularity, Instagram plays an important role in everyday digital life. It is a big disappoint if you find Instagram videos not playing on iPhone.

If you happen to have this issue, there are a few solutions to help you solve the problem Instagram video not working. Since it is hard to identify the cause of this problem, you may need to try more than one solutions below to sort it out.

Clear Instagram cache

As any other app, Instagram caches data to provide better performance. However, corrupted cache data can cause the issue video unable to play. In that case, you need to clear app cache on iPhone to fix it.

iPhone and Instagram do not provide an option to fully clear cache on Instagram, but you can partially delete Instagram cache by deleting the search history. Go to the Instagram Settings page and scroll down to select Clear Search History.

If you use cellular data to play Instagram videos, you should also stop Instagram from preloading videos and images. To do that, tap Options, select Cellular Data Use, and turn on Use Less Data.

To fully clear Instagram cache, you can uninstall and reinstall the Instagram app. to uninstall Instagram, go to Settings > General > Usage > Instagram, and then tap Delete App. 

Turn off Low Power Mode

Low power mode in iPhone is really helpful when you want your iPhone to live longer until the next charge. When Instagram detects low power mode is enabled, it will disable animations and other battery-hungry features like Instagram video playback.

Therefore, if your iPhone has Low power Mode enabled when you cannot watch videos on Instagram, then you should disable it in order to solve this problem.

The regular way to disable Low Power Mode is to go to Settings > Battery > Low Power Mode. You can also ask Siri to turn Low Power Mode quickly. If you use iPhone 6S or later versions of iPhone, you can firmly press Settings icon and select Batter > Low Power Mode.

Check Internet Connection

Another cause of Instagram video not playing is network connection issue. If you have this issue using cellular data, then switch to WiFi to see if it works. If Instagram video plays well on WiFi, then you should check if you have enabled Cellular Data Use for Instagram.

If Instagram only works on Cellular, then you should check your WiFi Router. Usually, a reboot will work.

If Instagram video does not work on both WiFi and Cellular, then you can consider resetting network settings of your iPhone. You can go to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings. After that reboot your iPhone and reconnect the network, and then you should be able to play Instagram videos on your iPhone.

Download Instagram Videos to iPhone - Permanent Solution

Instead of trying all these methods to fix it, you can also download Instagram videos to watch them offline on your iPhone. Luckily, there is a user-friendly tool, IOTransfer that can download videos from Instagram as well as YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitter (100+ sites) to your iPhone/iPad.

Step 1. Download and install IOTransfer on your Windows PC and connect your iPhone via lightning cable.

Step 2. Copy the URL of the Instagram video.                                                                                                                                    

Step 3. Within IOTransfer, click on the VIDEO tab at the top menu and paste the URL into theURL box.

Step 4. Check the option “Automatically transfer the downloaded videos into your iOS device” and click the Download button.

When it is complete, you can watch the Instagram video with the TV app on your iPhone.

Hard Reset iPhone

If you have iPhone backup available, you can restore your iPhone from iTunes backup. In this way, you can certainly solve the problem Instagram video not playing on iPhone without losing data.

If no backups are available and you are desperate to fix this problem, you can hard reset your iPhone to factory default settings. In this way, all your data will be erased. Therefore, you’d better backup your iPhone to PC before trying this method.

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