Instagram Resolves Bug That Triggered Hours-Long Outage

Several on Instagram shared their frustration on Twitter saying they were asked for email IDs and phone numbers to access their suspended account.

After social media application Instagram was hit by an outage for almost eight hours, the company on Monday informed it had fixed a software bug that prevented users from accessing the platform.

"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 the number of followers. Sorry," Meta Platforms Inc-owned Instagram tweeted on Monday.

Several Instagram shared their ire on Twitter saying they were asked for email IDs and phone numbers to access their suspended account. "We're looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience," tweeted Instagram communications earlier on receiving complaints from users.

From over 7,500 reports at 10:09 ET on outage-tracking website Downdetector, the number of user reports declined to nearly 500 around 6 PM ET, reported news agency Reuters.

Downdetector compiles 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 Meta-owned Instagram error comes days after the message-sharing platform WhatsApp also faced a global outage, including India, that lasted for over two hours. Several users across the country and abroad couldn’t share videos and photos on Whatsapp the next day after Diwali after it suffered a major outage on October 25.

The issue caught the attention of the government as the IT ministry asked Meta to submit a detailed explaining the outage. On Friday, PTI, citing government sources claimed that Meta’s report on the WhatsApp outage has already been submitted to the IT ministry. However, the contents of the report remain unknown.

Shares of Meta closed down 6.1 per cent amid a wider selloff in stock markets.