Instagram is down for thousands of people as social media users complain their accounts have been randomly suspended.
The social media site has been hit with an outage for the second time in as many weeks.
Just three days ago, it went down along with Facebook and WhatsApp - marking a network wide failure for the Meta company.
Today users started reporting the bug early this afternoon and outrage grew as it affected more and more people.
When trying to login, the users were met by a popup informing them that there account was suspended.
It read: "We suspended your account on 31 October 2022. There are 30 days remaining to disagree with this decision."
Around 12:40pm today the number of outages rocketed from a dozen, into the thousands over a matter of minutes, according to DownDetector.
This continued to rise and the nature of users seemingly having their accounts suspended has left some distressed.
But not everyone is affected and there is no word yet what caused the mystery outage, but people took to other social media platforms to complain about the issue.
One affected user said: "This is shocking. Instagram randomly decided to suspend my account. The account never had a single issue in all these years I'm using it and now suddenly its suspended."
Another said: "This is the scariest thing to happen today lol. Imagine waking up then you go to check Instagram and you're greeted with a screen saying your account has been deactivated. And you can't get it back either. Happy Halloween y'all stay safe!"
Even when users affected verified their email and phone number it seemed to make no difference to the problem they said.
Others were even less successful and when they tried to verify their details or appeal the decision the app glitched to not let them do so anymore, locking them out seemingly indefinitely with a black screen and a loading icon.
In a statement Instagram acknowledged the outage and said: "We're aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. We're looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience. #instagramdown".
Many users posting about ongoing turmoil and protests in Iran also claim to have lost thousands of followers "overnight", possibly linked to the outage.
Others however, made light of the situation and the outage, sharing memes online.
One user joked: "Man Zuck really said 'trick or treat b******' #instagramdown".
Another added: "Instagram really woke up today and said chaos #instagramdown".
The widespread problem also began trending on Twitter where users flocked and shared their complaints through #InstagramDown.
Other, more popular accounts noticed or complained about suddenly losing a number of followers as well.
Shortly before 1pm, the number of people reporting outages slowed slightly, but continued to grow.
