If you were booted off Instagram for no damn reason yesterday morning, you’re not alone. Tons of people were reporting the same problem. Instagram confirmed it was having some “issues” but didn’t clarify what type of issues they are or why any of this was happening.
Downdetector, which tracks outage complaints on popular platforms, saw a surge in reports for Instagram starting around 12 am AEDT on Tuesday morning. Users flocked to Twitter to share their stories, reporting a variety of problems. Some said they had attempted to log into their accounts, only to be greeted by a message telling them that their account had been suspended for violating community standards. Other users say they were met with a “user not found” message, as if their account had never existed in the first place. And still others were able to successfully log in but reported seeing their follower counts plummet precipitously for no apparent reason.
Around an hour after the mayhem started, at 1:14 am AEDT, Instagram put out a statement on Twitter confirming that something unusual was going on:
We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience. #instagramdown
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 31, 2022
It is unclear just how many people are being impacted by the incident. Downdetector shows a surge of at least 7,511 reports at the peak of discontent, though the true number is likely higher than that. Gizmodo reached out to Instagram for more details and will update this story if they respond. For now, we just have this ‘apology’ if you’ll call it that.
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! 😵💫https://t.co/Q1FBOEI97D
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 31, 2022
Some people are still reporting issues, however.
Of course, this isn’t the first time — nor likely the last — that Instagram or its parent company Meta suffers an outage. Last year, a massive outage took down all of Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, effectively erasing the tech giant’s presence from the web for a period of several hours. Clearly this isn’t that bad, though it’s not exactly the way you’d want to start your week if you’re a gram fan.
This article has been updated since it was first published.