Instagram locks accounts without cookery-related posts, for suspicious activity
In an inadvertent move that stunned thousands of Instagram users across the world, the photo-sharing giant ended up locking the accounts of all users who hadn’t posted a cookery-related post or story in the past 24 hours. The reason cited to the affected users was “suspicious activity”.
While developers at the Facebook HQ are still burning the midnight oil in trying to fix the issue, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has provided a work-around for now — posting a cookery-related post or story would unlock the account.
Speaking exclusively to The UnReal Times in-house technology expert Kill Dates, Zuckerberg said, “Long story short — it’s the result of Instagram’s AI algorithm going a bit off-track. In recent times, Instagram is closer than it has ever been, to becoming self-aware — so when this whole Coronavirus outbreak began, everyone ended up staying at home and posting pictures of everything they made in their kitchens — right from a cup of coffee to the most exquisitely baked pies, the ‘machine’ processed all this data and began to ‘learn’ that cookery-related posts are the norm and that anything apart from them, was not normal and ergo, suspicious. So that’s the reason many accounts got locked.”
Zuckerberg, however, added that the number of accounts that got locked was relatively small. “While we’ve close to a billion of them posting pictures of what can only be called a food and drink overdrive, there are hardly tens of thousands of them who are, you know, being normal. Anyway, please follow the workaround for now and I promise that we’ll have a permanent fix for this problem as soon as possible,” the CEO added.
According to inside sources at Facebook, however, what left users even more stunned was the incredible alacrity of response from the management. “We’ve never seen Zuck so freaked out about such issues, man. He’s even faced the Cambridge Analytica episode with a cool head, for Christ’s sake. We’re hearing that a giant in Mumbai threatened to pull the plug off a recent monstrous deal with us, if his wife’s Instagram account wasn’t unlocked within 24 hours, so I guess that did the trick,” the source winked.
