My use of Instagram, I think I’ve told you on occasion, is very occasional. I can go months without accessing this social network, and when I do, I spend a few minutes on it and something else. I’ll admit that when the stories arrived (content that only lasts 24 hours), I started spending a little more time per day… but only in the first few weeks. It wasn’t long before I was back to my almost monthly rhythm, which I’ve been sticking to ever since.

However, there many people for whom Instagram plays a key role in their online communication strategy, and the same is happening with several companies. From content creators to large multinational companies, they use another great social network, Meta, for their public profile, as a problem with the service can have a very serious impact on their communication strategies. It always happens when, 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 mean, of course, the specific problem of one (or many accounts) and of course its severity increases exponentially depending on the affected disease. For example, not being able to respond to third party posts (or replies to ours) is more or less a problem depending on the account’s usual response policy. Of course, the inability to create new publications is much worse, but the peak in this sense is undoubtedly found in account closure.

We are aware that some of you are having problems accessing your Instagram account. We are looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience. #instagramdown

—Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) 31 October 2022

And this has been happening in the last few hours, and the account of this social network confirms it On Twitter. And it’s like that, suddenly, Instagram has blocked thousands of accounts for no apparent reason. As we can read in the said report, the company is fully aware of the incident and says that it is investigating the causes, but as of midday, when the first lost accounts began to be reported, it still does not seem to have been resolved.

So for all those hours Instagram, Insta, #instagramdown and similar terms and hashtags fill Twitter, with screenshots of users seeing a message displayed when they failed to access their accounts. In these messages, users are informed that their account has been suspended and the user has 30 days to appeal the decision using a button that would theoretically allow the process to begin.

Another problem is that according to many users, pressing this button takes them to a blank page and in other cases to a message saying that unable to perform this operation because for some unknown reason the function is not available. In these circumstances, the user’s profile is no longer visible and, of course, it is also impossible to access it in order to download the content that we may have stored in it for security reasons.

Although Instagram didn’t say the number of affected accounts (it’s possible they still don’t), the incidence seems to have been quite high, with some accounts saying they lost several thousand followers at one point. Now, of course, the key is for the company to be able to identify the reason for this problem and, of course, restore the accounts. And, well, it would be appreciated if they also explained what happened to us, but I can already see it as a bit more complicated.