Instagram fixes bug that triggered hours-long outage

Instagram said on Monday (Oct 31) it had fixed a software bug that prevented thousands of users from accessing the photo-sharing platform for about eight hours and led to complaints of accounts being suspended.

"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 number of followers," Meta Platforms Inc-owned Instagram said in a tweet on Monday.

A spokesperson for Instagram did not comment on suspension of accounts. Several Instagram users had tweeted that they were asked for email IDs and phone numbers to access their suspended account.

From more than 7,500 reports at 10.09am Eastern Time (10.09pm Singapore time) on outage-tracking website Downdetector, the number of user reports declined to nearly 500 nearly eight hours later.

Downdetector collates 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.

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