Why did Instagram suspend my account? Users report widespread account suspensions

© Jenny Kane, AP Chinasa Elue, an associate professor of educational leadership and higher education at Kennesaw State University, began researching grief after her mother died in early 2019, nine months before the nation entered lockdowns. She said she found solace after turning to Instagram.

Instagram confirmed online Monday morning that many users were experiencing trouble accessing their accounts. 

Floods of users on Twitter reported having their account suspended. There were more than 7,000 reports of difficulties with the photo-sharing app as of 10:19 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages among apps and websites. Users on down director also reported being suspended or having their account deleted. 

“We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience,” Instagram said on Twitter at 10:14 a.m. 

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USA TODAY’s inquiry to Meta, Instagram’s parent company, about the outage was not immediately returned Monday morning. 

People uploaded screenshots of the message that appears when they try to log in. Several screenshots showed the message “We suspended your account on October 31, 2022” and “your account violated community guidelines.” The messages also said “if we can’t confirm your account, it will be permanently disabled.” 

One Twitter user who said they tried to appeal their Instagram account’s suspension said they were met with an error message when they tried to log back in “The username that you’ve entered doesn’t appear to belong to an account. Please check your username and try again.” 

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why did Instagram suspend my account? Users report widespread account suspensions