Istafa Ali
If you were booted off Instagram for no damn reason this morning, you’re not alone. Tons of people are reporting the same problem. Instagram has confirmed that it’s having some “issues” but hasn’t clarified what type of issues they are or why any of this is happening.
The Instagram outage that started Monday morning has been resolved, Instagram confirmed on its Twitter account. “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,” Instagram wrote. “Sorry!” The platform first confirmed the issue on Twitter at 10:14AM ET but didn’t say things were resolved until many hours later at 6PM ET. Adam Mosseri, who heads up Instagram, also apologized for the outage.
Our apologies… https://t.co/lsrvlFQDaJ
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) October 31, 2022
Downdetector, which tracks outage complaints on popular platforms, saw a surge in reports for Instagram starting around 9 a.m. EST on Monday 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.
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.
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.
