Technologies

Taylor Swift Is Engaged. Her Post Is Climbing Instagram’s Most-Liked List

The post is now at No. 8 for non-soccer related posts with 30 million likes. Check out the memes, details on her dress, his sweater and that ring.

Nobody is shaking this off: Pop superstar Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram on Tuesday, and the likes exploded like pyrotechnics at a concert. The post broke Instagram’s record for reposts, even though, to be fair, reposting just started on Instagram in August. Still, the post hit 1 million reposts in less than 6 hours and earned 14 million likes in just the first hour.

By Wednesday, it had topped 30 million likes, vaulting it to number eight on Instagram’s list of top non-soccer posts.

«Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,» Swift and Kelce wrote on an Instagram post showing multiple photos of the proposal. In the first photo, Kelce is kneeling in front of Swift in a breathtaking floral garden. The second photo shows them standing and holding one another. The next is her hand with an enormous diamond engagement ring, followed by two more of the couple embracing.

The post also features a dynamite emoji and the audio of Swift’s 2024 song So High School. The snippet cuts off with the lyrics, «Are you gonna marry, kiss, or kill me?» (Let’s hope it’s the first or second option.)

Instagram post is already climbing into the millions

As you might expect, the Instagram post delivering the engagement news shot into the stratosphere as soon as it was posted. A representative for Instagram confirmed to CNET that Swift and Kelce’s engagement announcement earned over 14 million likes and 452,000 reposts in just over an hour.

That’s a huge audience, but it will be interesting to see how high up Swift and Kelce’s engagement news post lands on Instagram’s all-time most popular list.

Right now, the most popular post ever on Instagram is from 2022, when soccer star Lionel Messi posted an image of himself hoisting the World Cup he’d just won. That post has more than 74 million likes. (Swifties, keep it going if you want to send the Swift-Kelce post to the top.)

The Instagram representative didn’t immediately comment on whether Swift and Kelce’s post is climbing at the same pace as Messi’s. Messi also has the third-most popular post, again showing him and the World Cup trophy, this time snuggled up in bed together.

But it’s not just soccer photos that top the Instagram most-viewed-ever list. The second most-liked post of all time is a photo of a plain, ordinary egg, posted to the social network back in 2019 as part of someone’s experiment to see if such a mundane image could go hugely viral. I interviewed the person behind Eugene the Egg back in 2019 and am shocked to see it’s still in the No. 2 spot six years later, with more than 60 million likes.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the post had reached 30 million likes, and was sitting at number eight on Instagram’s list of top posts that aren’t soccer-related. If it can garner 900,000 more likes, it can jump into seventh place, passing a reel of a smiley baby.

Details on the ring and outfits

According to The New York Post, Swift is wearing a blue silk-blend Polo Ralph Lauren dress in the photo, and Kelce is wearing a navy cable-knit Polo Ralph Lauren sweater. The Post also reports that Swift’s new engagement ring is «an old mine brilliant-cut diamond in a gold bezel setting, which was designed by Kelce himself with the help of Kindred Lubeck of Artifex Fine Jewelry.»

Old mine refers to a historic diamond cut popular from the early 18th century to the late 19th century. Such diamonds are square with rounded corners and have 58 facets, making them anything but a «paper ring.»

The Post delved into everything else Swift had on, including her cognac-colored Louis Vuitton sandals, $18,000 diamond-studded Cartier Santos Demoiselle watch and her «TNT» friendship bracelet by Wove, which was a Christmas gift from her new fiancé.

To no one’s shock, the $400 dress Swift is wearing is selling out fast. Just imagine the excitement when the wedding details start trickling out, and Swift begins to «pick out a white dress,» as Juliet does in Swift’s hit song Love Story.

Memeing the marriage proposal

Until we have more information about the upcoming wedding, fans will have to content themselves by creating and sharing memes because, well, it’s 2025, and that’s part of how we communicate these days.

The Instagram account belonging to the Prince and Princess of Wales even liked the post. (No surprise, really, they hung out when Swift played London.)

Even coffee giant Starbucks got into the act, making a joke about pumpkin spice lattes and posting, «Are we supposed to keep posting about PSL like nothing happened?» The company also noted in the post’s comments that «the long list of Starbucks lovers just got a +1.» («Starbucks lovers» is a sly reference to a lyric in Swift’s 2014 song Blank Space. Swift actually sings, «got a long list of ex-lovers,» but almost anyone with working ears mishears it as something like, «all the lonely Starbucks lovers.»)

One meme post on X showed Paul Revere’s famed ride, captioned «me telling everyone I know that Taylor Swift got engaged.»

me telling everyone I know that Taylor Swift got engaged pic.twitter.com/MpS8BLPOZj

— Siobhan ✨ (@Siobachka) August 26, 2025

One Bluesky user wrote, «Very interesting that Taylor Swift got engaged mere months after I did. Get your own thing.»

Another joked, «Can’t believe that on July 8th, 2023, @likethe309.bsky.social, Travis Kelce and I all walked into Arrowhead Stadium to attend the Eras Tour and now one of us is marrying Taylor Swift.»

Matt Ufford warned the billionaire bride-to-be and her millionaire NFL star husband to count their pennies, writing, «a word of warning to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce: weddings can get EXPENSIVE, fast. Be sure to leave enough in the account for your monthly expenses.»

There were football jokes, of course.

The Detroit Free Press sought a local connection, using the headline, «Tight end for Detroit Lions’ Week 6 opponent gets engaged to Taylor Swift.»

One person questioned the caption about an English teacher marrying a gym teacher, asking, «Why does Taylor Swift think she’s an English teacher and not a music teacher?»

We’re pretty sure this person really does know who Swift is, but their post was funny anyway. It reads, «Okay, I’ll bite: who’s Taylor Swift? What’s so great about him?»

The two 35-year-old celebrities have been dating for two years. It’s a love story, and Taylor just said yes.

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Cloudflare CEO Apologizes for ‘Unacceptable’ Outage and Explains What Went Wrong

For several hours Tuesday, a significant portion of the internet was unavailable in Cloudflare’s worst outage since 2019.

The Cloudflare outage on Tuesday that disrupted access to many websites and services — including OpenAI, Spotify, X, Grindr, Letterboxd and Canva — was the company’s worst outage since 2019, CEO Matthew Prince says.

Other disruptions have centered on specific network features, Prince wrote in a blog post. «But in the last 6+ years we’ve not had another outage that has caused the majority of core traffic to stop flowing through our network.»

Cloudflare is a cloud services and cybersecurity company based in San Francisco that is used by approximately 20% of all websites, according to W3Techs. It’s one of a handful of services, along with Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike and Fastly (all of which have experienced major outages in the past few years) that you might never have heard of, but that provide essential internet infrastructure.

The bulk of sites and services impacted by Tuesday’s outage, which began around 3:30 a.m. PT, seemed to recover within just over three hours. By the end of the day, everything had returned to normal, and Cloudflare set about explaining what went wrong. Here’s what you need to know.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

What caused the Cloudflare outage?

Cloudflare was keen to emphasize that the outage was not caused either directly or indirectly by a cyberattack. At first the company did suspect it might have originated from a «hyper-scale DDoS attack,» Prince said in his blog post. But it turned out that the outage resulted from an internal software failure.

A change in one of Cloudflare’s databases generated a larger-than-expected feature file, which was too big for the company’s software to run, said Prince. This caused the software to fail.

Once Cloudflare identified the problem, it was able to replace the problematic file with an earlier version and get most traffic flowing normally again by 6:30 a.m. PT.

«We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general,» said Prince. «Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today.»

Which sites and services were impacted?

Cloudflare has a massive range of clients across the internet, ranging from websites that are household names to smaller services you might not have heard of. Due to its size, when it went down, it took many of those sites and services with it.

Among those affected by the outage was Downdetector, which is where most people go to report problems when services are offline. (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Once it got back up and running, Downdetector said that it received over 2.1 million reports during the outage period. Over 435,000 of these came from the US, with the UK, Japan and Germany appearing to be the countries that were next most affected.

Most of the reports pertained to Cloudflare, but other affected companies also received a significant number of reports. They include X (320,549 reports), League of Legends (130,260 reports), OpenAI (81,077 reports), Spotify (93,377 reports) and Grindr (25,031 reports).

How did the outage unfold?

Cloudflare first acknowledged the outage at 3:48 a.m. PT. The company issued a statement on its system status page saying that it was aware of the problem.

«Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing,» it said. «We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.»

At 5:09 a.m. PT, the company said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented. In the subsequent hours, errors began to drop and services gradually came back online.

Cloudflare added at 9:14 a.m. PT that most services had returned to normal. «A full post-incident investigation and details about the incident will be made available asap,» it said.

Is the internet stable and reliable?

The Cloudflare outage comes just one month after Amazon Web Services went down, causing havoc across the internet. The AWS outage affected sites including Reddit, Snapchat, Roblox and Fortnite, sparking many to ask whether having such huge swaths of the internet reliant on a few centralized services is sensible or safe.

«The Cloudflare outage is not explicitly caused or linked to the AWS or Azure outages last month, but like those failures, it shows the impact of concentration risk,» said Brent Ellis, principal analyst at Forrester Research. «In this case, the 3 hour 20 minute outage could have direct and indirect losses of around $250 million to $300 million when you consider the cost of down-time and the downstream effects of services like Shopify or Etsy that host the stores for tens to hundreds of thousands of businesses.»

The disruption to services from ChatGPT maker OpenAI in particular highlighted concerns about the growing investment in artificial intelligence and the fragility of the cloud infrastructure that AI relies upon to function every day.

«The most dominant platform did not buckle because of simultaneous queries or the release of a new competitive model, but because of a problem with Cloudflare, a web security and performance provider,» said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. «The issue exposes the reality that this multibillion, even trillion-dollar investment in AI is only as reliable as its least scrutinized third-party infrastructure.»