Instagram announced on Monday that it has addressed a technical fault that had blocked thousands of users from accessing the photo-sharing platform for approximately eight hours, leading to reports of accounts being suspended.
“We’ve resolved this fault immediately – it was causing users in various areas of the world to have issues accessing their accounts and caused a temporary change in the number of followers for others,” Instagram, which is owned by Meta Platforms Inc, said in a tweet on Monday.
The suspension of accounts was not addressed by an Instagram spokesperson. When trying to access their suspended accounts, some Instagram users said that they were asked for their email addresses and phone numbers.
The number of user reports on the outage-tracking website Downdetector dropped from over 7,500 at 10:09 ET to nearly 500 around 6 PM ET.
On its platform, Downdetector collects status information from a variety of sources, including user-submitted errors. The outage might affect a much larger number of users. Meta’s shares dropped 6.1% while the stock market overall fell.
