Instagram ‘resolves bug’ after thousands of users suspended

Instagram users either couldn’t log in or were noticing follower counts suddenly dropping as their followers’ accounts appeared to be suspended.

An Instagram outage that started Monday morning has been resolved, Instagram confirmed on its Twitter account. During the outage, Instagram locked users out and told many of them that “we suspended your account on October 31, 2022.” Reports of the issue seemed to have been concentrated among iPhone users, with some saying their app was recently crashing and unusable ahead of an update earlier this morning.

“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.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0

Our apologies… https://t.co/lsrvlFQDaJ— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) October 31, 2022

Reports on Downdetector exceeded 7,000 right around when Instagram confirmed the issue, but have leveled off over the course of the day.

A quick look at Cristiano Ronaldo’s Instagram account at around 10:15AM ET showed it appeared to have lost 3 million followers from the 493 million it had just one day ago, but that number is back up to 493 million. Instagram’s own primary account was down by over a million.