Instagram users report outages and wave of account suspensions

Instagram is looking into the reasons behind an accidental wave of account suspensions, which have led many around the world to worry that their access to the social network has been curtailed for good.

At the same time, the stability of the service has taken a dive, with outages reported to the website downdetector.com spiking on Monday afternoon.

The scale of the accidental suspensions is significant enough that even users whose accounts are unaffected have noticed it, thanks to their displayed follower accounts dipping markedly.

It is less than a week since the last significant outage at Meta, the parent company of Instagram. Last Tuesday, WhatsApp suffered a multi-hour outage, affecting users worldwide. The messaging app did not provide an explanation for the fault.