Instagram said on Monday it was looking into an issue preventing thousands of its users from accessing the photo-sharing application.
The outage in some cases led to the suspension of users’ Instagram accounts. One user said the application had asked for their email and phone number to get the suspended account to work again.
“We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience,” Instagram said on its Twitter 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. <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/instagramdown?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#instagramdown</a>
—@InstagramComms
Some users reported seeing a message that they were locked out but were still able to scroll through their feeds. Others reported that their number of followers had dropped, presumably because those accounts were locked.
On Twitter, some users reported that they had regained access to their accounts, only to find all of their content was gone.
It was unclear whether the problem was an internal issue or whether the social media site had been hacked. An email to the company, which is owned by Facebook parent Meta, was not immediately returned.
Nearly 7,000 users of Instagram were impacted, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector, which collates status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage may be affecting a much larger number of users.
More to come.