Instagram is looking into the reasons behind an accidental wave of account suspensions, which have led many around the world to worry that their access to the social network has been curtailed for good.
Users began reporting problems at about 1300 GMT, turning to other social networks to post baffled screenshots of the ban notifications. “We suspended your account on October 31, 2022,” the warning reads, before telling affected posters that their account “doesn’t follow our community guidelines” and that it will be permanently disabled in the event of the suspension being upheld.
At the same time, the stability of the service has taken a dive, with outages reported to the website downdetector.com spiking on Monday afternoon.
“We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account,” the social network said in a tweet, its only public statement about the outage. “We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience.”
The scale of the accidental suspensions is significant enough that even users whose accounts are unaffected have noticed it, thanks to their displayed follower accounts dipping markedly.
It is less than a week since the last significant outage at Meta, the parent company of Instagram. Last Tuesday, WhatsApp suffered a multi-hour outage, affecting users worldwide. The messaging app did not provide an explanation for the fault.
The last time the cause of a big outage at Meta was diagnosed was October 2021, when a configuration mistake caused the company to accidentally remove itself from the internet. Although the error was swiftly uncovered and reversed, it took many hours for the wider web to update and acknowledge that Meta’s servers did in fact exist.
