SAN FRANCISCO: Instagram has announced that an outage which told users that their account is suspended is now fixed by the company. An eight-hour-long downtime was reported on both the app and the website of the Meta-owned photo-sharing platform.
Many users reported seeing a message that they were locked out (along with a “we suspended your account” message) but were still able to scroll through their feeds. Others posting on Twitter said they were completely shut out. Some reported that their number of followers dropped, presumably because those accounts were locked.
In an apology on Twitter, Instagram said: “We’ve resolved this bug now — it was causing people in different parts of the world to have issues accessing their accounts and caused a temporary change for some in the number of followers. Sorry.”
Instagram and Meta did not provide a reason.
The number of people complaining of being locked out of their accounts began to spike around 7:30 PM IST on October 31. As per Downdetector, over 7,000 users reported problems with Instagram.
It was unclear whether the problem was an internal issue or whether the social media site had been hacked.
Twitter was also trending with hashtag #InstagramDown, as hundreds of users experienced similar issues logging in to their accounts.
Instagram had tweeted last night: “We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience”.
Some users alleged that their accounts had been banned. Instagram told them that according to their policy, they might disable certain accounts that violate community guidelines, such as illegal, bullying, hate speech, spam, or violating intellectual property rights. When they tried logging back into their accounts, their email and password were reprotedly could not be found.
On October 25, people around the world had reported problems sending and receiving messages on chat app WhatsApp for almost two hours.
(With inputs from IANS, AP)
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