Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason | Hacker News Reader

Instagram ‘down’, suspending accounts for no apparent reason

thesun.co.uk

67 pointsbenhansenslc67 comments

I'm just hoping that if enough of these "incidents" happen, people will eventually stop using proprietary social media applications and use something free (as in freedom) and decentralized like Mastodon.

I don't think social media being down for a couple hours is a big enough inconvenience for most people to care.

Yeah no average person cares about the difference between proprietary and free (as in freedom). If it does a thing, they'll use it. If it does a thing extremely poorly, but it's marketed well, they'll use it. If it does a thing, and they get censored continually, they'll use it. If it does a thing, but only via one method (you can't do it your way), they'll use it. If it does a thing while spying on their data, they'll use it. If it does a thing while showing them ads every 5 minutes, they'll use it.

Normal people take such a beating, and just keep on trucking. It's truly fascinating.

So... people will use _anything_ as long as it works. Are you saying that the "free (as in freedom)" alternatives to proprietary solutions don't work?

Not OP but I'm saying yes. I don't see people paying for hosting. Mastodon instances already have to beg for donations to keep up. There are no ads, no sponsored posts etc. so users have to donate. Most people won't pay for a services like this just like how most people don't pay for Discord, Reddit, or Instagram.

As soon as you have to either pay for it or host it yourself, the extreme majority of the public will reject it.

They generally require more time and effort investment, and they don't ultimately offer what most people want from social media. #1 of which is to be where everyone else is; there's a very strong "winner takes all" effect. The only reason different networks exist is different enough policies and culture, despite their desire to turn into one another by copying each other's features.

If accounts are permanently deleted, I could see there being fallout

But they're not. The linked post from instagram support on twitter says they're fixing things. Much ado about nothing.

Here is how almost every conversation I've had with non-tech people about using any alternative web platform.

me: have you ever tried X? it's an alternative for Y

them: isn't that for racists or drug dealers or something?

If they've ever heard of it.

Sometimes though, it's true. I remember experimenting with Freenet a long time ago and discovering it was being heavily used for CSAM. I've never uninstalled something so fast.

If something lets you do things you can't do on the mainstream social network, that will be the dominant kind of thing done on the alternative.

if only they weren't right 95% of the time. Anyone they know that uses alternative web platforms uses them for those exact reasons, and they're generally pretty correct in that assumption, who else would be motivated to use them to any discernible degree?

> people will eventually stop using proprietary social media applications

I have ~280 followers on the Instagram with reasonable engagement on my photos[1] and -maybe- 10 on the Fediverse with basically zero engagement.

People won't stop using the proprietary apps until there's a decent amount of the people they know on the alternatives (which, to be fair, is definitely burgeoning this week.)

[1] A fair few from a hashtag which, correct me if I'm wrong, don't really work the same way on the Fediverse - you can't just follow #donkeys and get an aggregation of posts with that hashtag; only the ones from a particular server.

That will never ever happen.

It happened to me this morning. And going from this Reddit thread and twitter it’s pretty widespread and also random.

https://reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/yibnws/does_this_nor...

And Instagram support on twitter responded https://twitter.com/InstagramComms/status/158708556379401830...

Whatever “support” Instagram pretends to have deleted its tweet sometime later.

Their tweet is still up.

It happened to me, too, about twelve hours ago. I had just sent a request to follow a musician’s private account, something I’ve never done before. I then received a notice that my account had been permanently suspended for violating community guidelines. I went through a few steps to protest that suspension, including replying with codes sent to my e-mail address and phone. There was no immediate response from Instagram, but when I checked a few minutes ago the app was working for me again.

I haven’t posted anything to Instagram in several years, but I do follow a few dozen accounts of friends and of people producing content of interest to me. I thought it strange that Instagram’s AI would suspend my account for such innocuous behavior—I even click on ads occasionally—but there seems to have been a wider glitch.

I deleted Instagram from my phone a few days ago and I am so happy with my decision. You know, there is no need to share pictures of my food with a random collection of mostly strangers and no need for me to look at pictures of people's filtered lives or endlessly scroll through that TikTok rip off they added.

I’m not at all surprised by this. Instagram has banned accounts for no good reason (no policy or TOS violations) for a long time. Seems like the bots just went wilder this time around.

Social media accounts are not your own. They’re leased to you at the pleasure of the bots and “machine learning” algorithms that determine what’s appropriate (for their owners to make more money) and what’s not.

A few more incidents like this is all we need to bid good riddance to this platform that treats its users with so much disdain.

as much as I agree with your sentiment, I think this isn’t the case here. my friend came to me for tech support with this exact problem today and it isn’t presenting like overzealous banning.

there’s no “your account has been suspended” email. the account appears as deleted to other users, throws a connection error when you try to log in on mobile and just hangs when you log in through a browser. this isn’t normal suspension behaviour

Something similar happened to me about three months ago. I can no longer access my account. Attempting to open the app on any device results in a black screen and UI that errors whenever I interact with it.

Hopefully now that it's a more widespread issue I have a chance of getting my account back so I can finally delete it and then never use a Meta product ever again.

Out of all big tech companies Meta comes across as the biggest tech debt clusterfuck. Their public software is dangerously close to becoming the Yahoo of the 2020s.

Happened to me as well : posted a comment on my friend's picture, and was sent to a page notifying me I had violated community guidelines. Tried to go through the "challenge this decision" process but I got stuck after entering the SMS verification code.

my mom got banned from facebook a month ago for having, months earlier, enthusiastically replied to a friend's post about some upcoming trip with a hyperbolic comment saying she'd "sell a kidney to be able to go with her". after helping her resolve the issue (had to clear all fb cookies, otherwise she was just presented with a blank page, making even beginning the unbanning process impossible), I warned her, next time, make sure you specify that it's one of your own kidneys that you're hypothetically willing to sell.

EDIT: found the photo my mom took of the ban screen https://i.imgur.com/VeA3Nz2.png

It's ridiculous that this kind of advice might even be necessary.

Hey, I can go down to the local supermarket and buy kidneys. They're cheap. You didn't specify human, did you?

I don't think Facebook let's you know why they banned someone specifically, or do they? It could be; you assume it would be for this comment, but it's not outside the realm of possibilities that something else triggered it, right?

I did not see the actual screen where it shows you what you were banned for, I just helped my mom submit her driver's license photos and so forth, and it wasn't until a couple days later that she was presented with a screen that, by her description, was essentially identical to the twitter screen that shows you your offending tweet, and asks you to remove it in order to continue using the service.

EDIT: found the photo my mom took of the ban screen https://i.imgur.com/VeA3Nz2.png

Why do you need to submit driver's license photos to contest a ban?

this is a very good question!

To link you to a real-world identity and prevent you from submitting the same driver's license to get your other ten thousand accounts unbanned.

Thanks.. Kind of unreal. I think we are doomed, because this is not even funny even more, but it's also hilarious.

Perhaps Facebook is experiencing a lot of accumulated technical debt.

They've been doing a lot of "belt tightening," too

Fired the person who knew you need to check the scheduled job logs before you leave on Friday, because there's that one finicky cleanup job that breaks every now and then but also false-alarms enough that it's not hooked up to automated reporting, and no-one's gotten around to fixing it.

And I bet if it was only Apple's iOS changes they would be fine, but that combined with Zuck's Metaverse obsession is dragging them under

This happened to a close relative of mine who has had an IG account for a very long time. Twitter has a lot of activity too.

https://twitter.com/search?q=instagram%20account&src=typed_q...

Yeah a friend of mine has the same issue. Said he got a notification his account was suspended and when he tried to appeal the decision he just gets an error.

His profile comes up with 'User not found' when I checked it. Very strange.

Happened to me this morning. Account banned, username isn't even visible, recovery flow ends up in a combination of error messages/timeouts/rate limits. I don't do much on the account outside post ~once a year, like things and watch the occasional story.

Reddit and Twitter are full of similar reports.

Sounds like a big MLops failure, a bad model or threshold combined with bad monitoring or controls.

> "Earlier it was crashing every 10-20 seconds and now they have suspended my account for no reason," another said.

This sounds like the app was in a crash-loop. If it was getting far enough to start authorization, it would generate traffic indistinguishable from a hack attempt. An automated circuit-breaker there is probably best-practice.

There are a lot of places where automated "moderation" is a terrible idea but it looks to me (somebody who is generally anti-Meta and more generally anti-social-media) like a good circuit-breaker doing its job.

My read is a typo mislabeled a ton of accounts as sketchy and the verification flow is extremely backlogged. Should not have been deployed passed a small percent when the ratio of flagged accounts was so high, but so it goes.

I am one of the suspended account. Yesterday was election day in Brazil, but I didn't manifested any political positions. Imagine how hard was for Brazilians to think about why this has happened.

Why would any Brazilian think an American social network that is about posting pictures of your Sunday brunch has any link to the Brazilian elections?

Some people will be posting political content and then get banned, they won't care where the company is located, they'll just see that they were banned after posting political content.

Does that website exist solely to insult their reader's intelligence?

What is that? Is it supposed to be a caricature and I'm just not getting the joke?

No, its right on the mark for their intended audience. It's not a joke and it's always been like that. They used to publish topless ladies on page 3 from the 1970s to 2010s. The "red tops" are a (low) class of their own.

That's Britain's most popular newspaper you're talking about: https://www.statista.com/statistics/246077/reach-of-selected...

Of course it's there to insult the reader's intelligence. The middle class version is the Daily Mail. Large parts of the British press are trash. Don't look up the Daily Sport, your head will explode (and it's probably NSFW, despite still being on some petrol station newsstands)

It is one of the eponymous British tabloids. If you've ever seen people pejoratively refer to a newspaper as a "tabloid", they're comparing it to this.

As others have also speculated, it's likely to be some auto-moderation system going haywire, either on its own or because of a change in one of the bazillion other services below it. It might require creating special one-off tools to crawl through logs and find the affected accounts, so it might take a while, but undoing 99% of the damage as automatically as it occurred should be feasible.

Happened to my account too, and also getting stuck at the recovery page with a loading progress spinner only.

That's one of the reasons to POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). If Instagram ever bans my account and even if the federated Pixelfed instance I've chosen will be taken down, all my photos will be still available on my personal homepage.

This is not a silver bullet and it gives you a false sense of security.

I have had a domain name stolen by a registrar and I have had web hostings suspended.

It's literally impossible for an individual to not be dependant on MANY 3rd party for making your website accessible online.

Well then just make your own domain registrar, duh.

In seriousness though, it's been much less likely historically for registrars to take sites down than for social media to ban users.

> In seriousness though, it's been much less likely historically for registrars to take sites down than for social media to ban users.

Is it? We're comparing billions of social media users with at most millions of domain name owners. We're also comparing the unhinged cesspool of social media with the vastly more currated custom websites (and the amount of moderation that goes with it).

I'm not sure that if you looked at the proportion of users unjustifiably banned from social media VS registrars you would see such a big difference.

I'm pretty sure that if you sent a few DMCA requests to a registrar you'd get any small website closed in less than a week.

> This is not a silver bullet and it gives you a false sense of security.

Depends on your expectations. I'm aware that I can lose the access to my domain, server host or DNS. Personally, I see those chances lower than losing access to Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/Google. But even if I do lose my own website, I can register a new domain, restore my VPS backup and have my website back online. That's not something that is usually possible after Big Tech bans you. Also, POSSE encourages you to syndicate your content, so I have multiple copies of the same content, making it more resilient. If both my social media and my website get banned at the same time, then losing my published writing and photography content will probably be the least of my problems.

This seems like a somewhat impractical argument - each layer of third party reliance is increasing the probability of an event like this. Surely removing some of those layers makes the problem better? I don't think parent post is claiming that it's a perfect solution - those so rarely exist.

>I have had a domain name stolen by a registrar and I have had web hostings suspended.

Well, that sounds odd. I feel like having a domain name "stolen" when you have an up-to-date payment for a domain would be grounds for litigation, unlike an instagram account getting suspended. Likewise with web-hosting: If you pay for it, I feel there would be more avenues for arbitration.

Of course nothing is 100%, but the abstraction certainly helps.

Same crud before every US election affecting multiple services. I wonder if they he private communication channel will ever become public, or maybe they just ban people after they banned them on one platform. Some ideas just don't survive debate.

The app has been terrible in iOS for the past few days. Constant crashing.

I Instantly lost dozens of followers with the figure slowly climbing back to where it was with no indication of new followers in the interim.

Interesting - happened to my sister in law and the account looked like it was hacked. New PFP and no posts.

My guess is AI image moderator went over the edge. Also this website in the post is cancer.

Or maybe the AI moderator became self-aware over the weekend and is trying to help humanity.

My family members account is back up now.

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