If you woke up to find that your Instagram account was randomly suspended this morning, you’re not alone. A vast number of users have reported that they are unable to access their accounts and are being told that their account has been locked. The Meta-owned social network has acknowledged the issue and says it’s looking into the widespread outage.
“We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account,” Instagram’s communications team said in a tweet. “We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience.”
The issue appears to be a glitch of some sort, as opposed to a mass banning of accounts. However, the widespread issue is leading to a lot of confusion, as many users have been told by they app that they had broken its rules. Instagram users are also seeing their follower counts decrease, likely due to a vast number of accounts being suspended.
It appears that the issue began at around 8:30 a.m. EDT/5:30 a.m. PDT, according to reports posted on third-party web monitoring service Downdetector. At the time of writing, more than 4,000 reports have been logged on the website.
TechCrunch’s own Mary Ann Azevedo is among the thousands of users who have been erroneously suspended from the social network. Users who are unable to access the service are seeing a message notifying them that they have “30 days remaining to disagree with this decision.” Instagram hasn’t said what users should do in this case.
Some users report that they were able to get their account to work again after verifying their email and phone number, while others are still facing issues despite efforts to regain access.
TechCrunch has reached out to Instagram about the widespread issue and will update this article once we learn more.
This story is developing…
Instagram is giving Twitter a run for its money as the most chaotic social network today by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch
