Facebook-owned Instagram has apologized for a technical bug that globally deleted the story posts by millions of users, including social activists.
Instagram Head Adam Mosseri said in a tweet on Friday that the platform experienced a technical bug, which impacted millions of people’s stories, highlights, and archives around the world.
“For people impacted by this bug, they saw their stories that were re-sharing posts disappear and their archive and highlights stories were missing,” Mosseri informed.
The technical problem appeared around the National Day of Awareness of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, with organizations like Red Dress questioning whether their posts had been deleted deliberately.
“This day is incredibly important to raise awareness of this critical issue and support our Indigenous community on Instagram,” the Instagram head said.
“We apologize to all those who felt like they could not bring attention to these incredibly important causes, and many others around the world,” he added.
Instagram had said in an earlier tweet that some people were experiencing issues uploading and viewing stories.
“This is a widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic and we’re fixing it right now. We’ll provide an update as soon as we can,” it had said.
Mosseri said that several people thought the company was “removing their content because of what they posted or what hashtag they used”.
“But this bug wasn’t related to the content itself, but rather a widespread issue that has now been fixed”.
