Many Instagram users around the globe found themselves unable to access their accounts on Monday morning, while others reported losing hundreds to millions of followers. Instagram’s PR team confirmed the widespread issues on Twitter Monday morning. About eight hours later, they said the problem had been rectified. “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 number of followers. Sorry,” the tweet reads. It’s unclear what caused the outage. Instagram did not provide any information about the bug.
More Than Connection Issues
Users started reporting issues accessing Instagram just some minutes after 9 a.m. EST. At one point, approximately 7700 users reported on Downdetector that they could not access Instagram. Users encountered different issues when they tried to log into Instagram, including:
Getting a notice of suspension and possible deletion of their accounts Not receiving the confirmation code required to log in An error stating that no such account can be located Never-ending loading screens
Several Instagram users posted screenshots of their suspension notices on Twitter. User Trendulkar, for example, tweeted: “anyone else facing this issue on Instagram? or is my account really suspended?” Users also reported losing large numbers of IG followers. Instagram’s official account was not exempt from the fallout. According to social media consultant Matt Navarra, Instagram lost 1.49 million followers from its official account. The vast number of suspended accounts may have led to the loss of followers across the platform. It is unclear if the missing followers have been restored to the affected accounts, as the bug has been fixed.
Just Another Bad Day for Meta
This outage comes less than a week after WhatsApp, another Meta-owned app, experienced a two-hour service disruption. While Meta did not reveal the cause of the issue, a website that tracks WhatsApp news and updates said it was a “server-side” problem. On Wednesday, Oct. 26, while Meta engineers were working on getting WhatsApp back online, the company reported lower-than-anticipated earnings and plummeting stock share prices. Meta’s earnings for the third quarter of 2022 dropped by four percent year-over-year. Compared to June last year, when it was priced at over $350, Meta shares currently cost less than $100.
