Instagram fixes bizarre outage that locked accounts, cut follower counts

A bizarre Instagram outage that began Monday morning locked out users and told many that “we suspended your account on October 31, 2022” has been fixed.

Many Instagram follower counts also dropped rapidly, thanks to the mass suspensions.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s Instagram account lost more than 3 million followers from the 493 million it has a day ago, and Instagram’s own official account was down by over a million, reported The Verge.

Around 6 PM, 8 hours after the troubles started, Instagram tweeted that the problem had been fixed: “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!”

Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is also President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.