If you were booted off Instagram for no damn reason this morning, you’re not alone. Tons of people are reporting the same problem. Instagram has confirmed that it’s having some “issues” but hasn’t clarified what type of issues they are or why they might be happening.
Downdetector, which tracks outage complaints on popular web platforms, saw a surge in reports for Instagram starting around 9 a.m. EST on Monday morning. Users flocked to Twitter to share their stories, reporting a variety of problems. Some said they had attempted to log into their accounts, only to be greeted by a message telling them that their account had been suspended for violating community standards. Others said they were met with a “user not found” message, as if their account had never existed in the first place. And still others were able to successfully log in but reported seeing their follower counts plummet precipitously for no apparent reason.
Around an hour after the mayhem started, at 10:14 a.m. EST, Instagram put out a statement on Twitter confirming that something unusual was going on:
It is unclear just how many people are being impacted by the incident. Downdetector shows a surge of at least 7,511 reports at the peak of discontent, though the true number is likely higher than that. Gizmodo reached out to Instagram for more details and will update this story if they respond.
Of course, this isn’t the first time—nor likely the last—that Instagram or its parent company Meta suffers an outage. Last year, a massive outage took down all of Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, effectively erasing the tech giant’s presence from the web for a period of several hours. Clearly this isn’t that bad, though it’s not exactly the way you’d want to start your week if you’re a gram fan.