Instagram says looking into complaints after users report outage

Some Instagram users said they were locked out of their accounts (AP file photo)

Social media platform Instagram on October 31 said it was addressing complaints raised by scores of users, who have been unable to access its services.

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.

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," the company, owned by Facebook parent Meta Platforms, 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. #instagramdown

— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) October 31, 2022

Some users reported seeing a message that they were locked out but were still able to scroll through their feeds. Others posting on Twitter said they were completely shut out. Some reported that their number of followers dropped, presumably because those accounts were locked.

The disruption in services was reported days after WhatsApp, another Meta group entity, suffered a global outage.

Tens of thousands of WhatsApp users, across various parts of the world, had complained of a brief outage on October 25. The messaging application later said that the outage was a result of a "technical error".

With Reuters & AP inputs