Instagram fixes bug that triggered hours-long outage

(Reuters) -Instagram said on Monday it had fixed a software bug that prevented thousands of users from accessing the photo-sharing platform for about eight hours and led to complaints of accounts being suspended.

"We've resolved this bug now - it was causing people in different parts of the world to have issues accessing their accounts and caused a temporary change for some in number of followers," Meta Platforms Inc-owned Instagram said in a tweet on Monday.

A spokesperson for Instagram did not comment on suspension of accounts. Several Instagram users had tweeted that they were asked for email IDs and phone numbers to access their suspended account.

From over 7,500 reports at 10:09 ET on outage-tracking website Downdetector, the number of user reports declined to nearly 500 around 6 PM ET.

Downdetector collates status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage may be affecting a much larger number of users.Shares of Meta closed down 6.1% amid a wider selloff in stock markets.

(Reporting by Tiyashi Datta and Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri, Arun Koyyur and Anil D'Silva)