SAN FRANCISCO - Instagram said on Monday it has 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-owned Instagram said in a tweet on Monday.

A spokesman for Instagram did not comment on suspension of accounts.

Several Instagram users had tweeted that they were asked for e-mail IDs and phone numbers to access their suspended account.

From more than 7,500 reports at 10.09am Eastern Time in the United States (10.09pm Singapore time) on outage-tracking website Downdetector, the number of user reports declined to nearly 500 at around 6pm.

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 per cent amid a wider sell-off in stock markets. REUTERS