Screenshot of a suspended Instagram account (Twitter)

Meta-owned social networking service Instagram said Tuesday its software bug, which resulted in a global-scale malfunction and affected random users, was fixed after eight hours.

According to a US-based service outage-tracking website Downdetector, reports regarding the malfunction of Instagram soared starting around 10 p.m. Monday in Korea.

Reports of the Instagram service malfunction soared from 305 at 9:48 p.m. to 7,300 at 11 p.m.

Reported in-app type failures varied, such as suspension of accounts, unintentional blockage of accounts and sudden change in number of followers.

“My account was suddenly suspended out of nowhere, when I haven’t uploaded anything in more than a week,” said Kim Na-hee, a college student.

Regarding the service disruption, an official from Instagram Korea told The Korea Herald that all of the services have been completely restored as of Tuesday afternoon, and that rumors circulating about the service malfunctions were mostly untrue.

“Some users have reported concerns their follower numbers decreased, but the numbers didn’t actually change. They were temporarily wrongly represented in the profile page due to an unknown reason. They are all restored back to normal now. All the suspended accounts are now restored as well,” she said.

When asked about the rumors over external hacking, she said "there's almost no chance."

Meanwhile, on Oct. 26, Meta's global mobile messenger WhatsApp had experienced a global scale service malfunction -- with the users unable to send or receive new messages, sign up for WhatsApp, update their profile information or access the privacy setting for two hours.

(yoonseo.3348@heraldcorp.com)