Instagram outage today: App appears to suspend massive number of accounts as platform ‘looking into’ issue

The account suspension bug is unlike other problems: it’s not just a matter of not being able to get online, and is rather more concerning than that.

Those affected are instead told their account has been suspended, because they have violated Instagram’s “community guidelines”. They are notified of such and told they can appeal the decision within a month – after which it will be permanently disabled.

People who do try and appeal are then logged out of their accounts and are not able to get back in again. This appears to confirm that the suspensions are a bug, rather than a normal error, which suggests there is hope that they will get their accounts back again.

But Instagram is yet to give much detail about the problems, including when or how they might be fixed. (And it does not have a customer service route for anyone to ask about such things.)

The strange suspension error is not the only problem happening on Monday, according to some reports. Other users report that the app is crashing, and seeing other unusual behaviour.

But it’s the suspension problem that remains the most significant one.

It’s impossible to say how many people are affected by the problems – only Instagram knows for sure – but it seems significant. Some people report seeing their follower counts going by hundreds, as a result of the deactivation, so it appears to be affecting a large number of users.

It’s now two hours since Instagram put out this tweet. (The issue had been going on for some time before that.)

But there hasn’t been an update since, and users are still stuck and locked out of their accounts.

Instagram doesn’t really have any way of getting in contact with its staff, which means that unlike more traditional companies there’s no straightforward way of getting help with a problem like this. The only real way is to contact them on other platforms, such as Twitter, but there’s no guarantee that will come to anything.

The company’s only official response so far has been the tweet below – which indicates that Instagram is aware of the problem, but not when or how it might be fixed.

The mass suspension and/or bug has come at a big time for Instagram: just after Hallowe’en weekend, and with hours to go before the big evening. As such, many are afraid they won’t get to share their costumes if their accounts don’t come back.

Instagram has finally addressed the problems in a tweet. But notably it gives no information on whether the suspensions are a bug, or whether accounts will be automatically restored once the issue is fixed.