Instagram DOWN: Huge outcry over 8-hour app, website outage

Did you get a “Instagram account suspended” message yesterday, October 31? The company has finally fixed the issue that caused an outage for more than 8 hours.

Received an “Instagram account suspended” message? Check again. The issue has been fixed. (Pixabay)

Many users received an Instagram Halloween scare yesterday, October 31, when they logged in to their account only to receive a message that said “Instagram account suspended”. Now, that is as shocking as it is scry! Thousands of others also reported trouble logging in to their accounts. And those who were able to successfully access their profile noticed their followers count dropping as the social media app deemed many accounts to be suspended. The strange outage was first reported at around 7:30 PM IST. However, Instagram has now fixed the issue. It is not sure what caused this outage but the issue does not seem to be persisting anymore.

At 3:30 AM IST today, November 1, the official handle of Instagram took to Twitter to announce that the issue had been fixed. It tweeted, “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. Sorry”.

Instagram fixes its weird “account suspended” glitch

In the Instagram outage, many people received an alarming message that their account is no longer operational. One screenshot shared on Twitter highlighted the text “We suspended your account on August 31. There are 30 days remaining to disagree with this decision”. As more users reported the same message, it quickly became clear that the social media platform was not suspending accounts randomly but was facing an outage.

Within minutes, Instagram's Twitter handle apologized in a tweet and said that it was aware that people were facing issues accessing their account. It also reassured them that they were working to fix the issue.

According to Downdetector, an online website outage monitoring platform, there were more than 7,000 reports of the issue when Instagram confirmed the issue. The issue was not region specific, meaning people across the globe faced the issue.

WhatsApp, which is another Meta product just like Instagram, also faced a major outage just a few days ago. During that outage, the Android and iOS app, web client and the desktop software all stopped working for more than two hours resulting in users not being able to send or receive messages or update their status.