Instagram has acknowledged the existence of a certain bug that currently causes some accounts to appear to have been deleted or disabled for no valid reason at all, according to a report. According to the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service, these accounts have not been deleted, actually, and that it is looking for solutions to the bug. Affected users quickly took to social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to voice their concern and to blame Instagram for the incident. It appears now that the apparent deletion of multiple accounts is a random occurrence, meaning that there is no definite reason why the bug has caused those accounts to shut down and prevented account owners from logging in. It remains unclear how many users were affected, as well as the scope of the incident.
The random account deletion surprised several users, who said they did not receive any notification or email from Instagram as to why their accounts disappeared. Upon logging in, some users saw several error messages, including one that tells them their account has been disabled for violating Instagram’s terms of use. Another error message asks users to try again at a later time as there was a problem logging them in. Still another one instructs users to enter a confirmation code. Some users who were prompted by Instagram to enter their phone numbers for verification upon attempting to log in reported that they did not receive any confirmation message containing a six-digit code, which should have been the case once users are asked for their contact numbers.
This is not the first time, though, that the popular photo-sharing app was hit with a massive trouble. Instagram accounts have been targets of various hijacking attempts in the past due to a number of vulnerabilities that have so far been fixed by Facebook. Just recently, in May last year, Facebook fixed an authentication loophole in Instagram that could have compromised millions of accounts. In March of this year, the social media giant also rolled out the two-factor authentication process to all users in an effort to keep their accounts safe. A fix to the latest bug affecting many Instagram users should come shortly.