On Oct. 31, millions of Instagram users experienced an outage that told them that their accounts had been suspended.

These users were not given an explanation as to why they had suddenly been suspended, causing confusion and chaos. Users were logged out of their accounts with a message saying “We suspended your account on October 31, 2022.” Even those who were not suspended were affected, as they lost followers due to the number of users being suspended. 

“I was so scared I started sobbing on a call with my friends because I thought I got hacked,” Anna Piscioneri (11), victim of the outage, said. “I thought my account was gone forever, but then I got it back 40 minutes later and I was so happy.”

Many users were in distress because they thought they had lost their accounts with years of stacked up memories and valuable relationships. To lose all of this without any convincing reasoning was a shock to many users. 

Thankfully, Instagram fixed the problem quite quickly, and within 40 minutes to an hour after the outage, users’ accounts were restored and follower counts returned to normal.