Instagram down for several users, days after global WhatsApp outage

An Instagram outage started on Monday morning locking many users out and telling many of them that “we suspended your account on October 31, 2022”.

Owned by Facebook parent Meta Platforms, users of the photo-sharing application (app) were unable to retrieve their account despite clicking on the ‘Disagree with decision’ option.

The social media platform has over 230 million users in the country as of January this year.

According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, at the peak of the outage, over 7,000 users reported being unable to log in.

Instagram has admitted these accounts were inaccessible to users.

“We are aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. We are looking into it and apologise for the inconvenience,” Instagram said on its Twitter account.

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 had complained of a brief outage on October 25. The messaging application later said that the outage was a result of a “technical error”.

“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp. We’ve fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience,” a spokesperson for Meta had said. 

It was followed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology seeking a report on the outage. The ministry asked the messaging platform to submit its report to its nodal agency Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). The main worry was a probable cyber incident causing the outage.