Instagram fixes the software bug that locked users out of their accounts

Meta-owned Instagram fixed a software bug on Monday after thousands of users were locked out of their accounts.

"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 the number of followers," the Meta Platforms Inc-owned company said in a tweet.



The number of people complaining of being locked out of their accounts began in the evening around 6 PM. After users flooded social media platforms about the issue, Instagram acknowledged the problem. In a couple of hours, the tweet had received more than 14,000 comments and was retweeted more than 40,000 times.

The hashtag #InstagramDown was trending on Twitter.

The bug was preventing users from accessing the photo-sharing platform for about eight hours and led to complaints of accounts being suspended. While some users reported seeing a message that they were locked out but were still able to scroll through their feeds, others were completely shut out.

After the outage, several Instagram users tweeted that they were asked for email IDs and phone numbers to access their suspended accounts.

A few also reported that their number of followers dropped, presumably because those accounts were locked. The photo-sharing platform also informed the people that the bug might have caused a temporary change in the number of followers for some users.

The Instagram policy stated that they may disable certain accounts that violate community guidelines, such as illegal, bullying, hate speech, spam, or violating intellectual property rights, according to the report.

It was unclear whether the problem was an internal issue or whether the social media site had been hacked.

Meanwhile, this is the second time in a week that users in India and several parts of the world reported problems with Instagram. According to the outage-tracking website Downdetector, over 900 users in India reported issues in accessing Instagram.