My use of Instagram, I think I’ve already told you on occasion, is very occasional. I can go months without accessing that social network and, when I do, I spend a few minutes on it and on to something else. I admit that when the stories arrived (content that only lasts 24 hours) I did start to spend a little more time a day… but only during the first weeks. It didn’t take me long to return to my almost-monthly rhythm, in which I have maintained until now.
However, there many people for whom Instagram plays a key role in their online communication strategy, and the same happens with not a few companies. From content creators to large multinationals, they use Meta’s other great social network for their public profile, because a problem with the service can have a very serious impact on their communication strategies. This happens whenever, for example, there is a service outage, like the one we experienced last week with WhatsApp (also from Meta), but there is something that can be even worse than a general service outage.
I am referring, of course, to a specific problem of one (or many accounts) and, of course, its severity increases exponentially depending on the disease afflicted. For example, not being able to respond to third-party posts (or replies to ours) is more or less of a problem, depending on that account’s usual response policy. Not being able to create new publications is much worse, of course, but the top of the range in this sense is found, without a doubt, in the closing of the account.
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
And that is what is happening, during the last hours, and that has been confirmed by the account of this social network On twitter. And it is that, suddenly, Instagram has blocked thousands of accounts for no apparent reason. As we can read in said message, the company is fully aware of the incident and claims to be investigating the causes, but since noon, when the first dropped accounts began to be reported, it still does not seem to have been solved.
So for all these hours Instagram, Insta, #instagramdown and similar terms and hashtags are populating Twitter, with screenshots of users showing the message displayed when they unsuccessfully try to access their accounts. In these messages, users are informed that their account has been suspended, and the user is given a period of 30 days to appeal said decision, with a button that, in theory, would allow the process to be started.
The added problem is that, according to many users, pressing this button takes them to a blank page and, in other cases, to a message indicating that it is not possible to carry out this operation because, for an unclear reason, the function is not available. In these circumstances, the user’s profile is no longer visible and, of course, it is also not possible to access it in order, as a security measure, to download the content that we may have stored in it.
Although Instagram has not indicated the number of affected accounts (it is possible that they still do not know it) it seems that the incidence has been quite high, with some accounts stating that they have lost, at one point, several thousand followers. Now, of course, the key is for the company to be able to identify the reason for this problem and, of course, to restore the accounts to their previous state. And, well, it would be appreciated if they also explained to us what happened, but I already see that as a little more complicated.
