Meta has issued a detailed explanation and apology after the Instagram account for the No Kings movement was suspended for several hours during the group’s nationwide “day of action” rallies, an outage the company blames on an automated system mistaking unusual reading activity for bot behavior.
According to Business Insider, the No Kings account was locked and its administrators denied access on Saturday, when the nonpartisan network said it held nearly 3,000 rallies across the country aimed at encouraging early voting.
Meta initially said the suspension happened “in error” due to an automatic trigger, offering a fuller account a day later. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone explained on X that the company’s engineering team traced the shutdown to a spike in the account’s “reading” behavior.
“Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior,” Stone wrote.
“Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17,” Stone wrote.
That pattern resembled bot traffic, prompting the system to take the account offline. The account itself came back online relatively quickly. “An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account,” Stone wrote. But administrator access took longer to restore. “It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account,” he said.
Stone closed with an apology: “We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error.”
No Kings and lawmakers react
No Kings organizers objected to the timing of the outage, which hit during an active voter-mobilization push. “Restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable,” the group said in a statement, adding: “Meta must answer for this suspension and take immediate steps to ensure it never happens again, to any account, but especially those working to inform voters and encourage participation in our democracy.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a longtime advocate of stricter tech regulation and anti-monopoly measures, called Sunday evening for an investigation into the shutdown, describing it as a “total indictment of Meta’s outsized influence on our culture and politics.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has also criticized the suspension, framing it as part of a broader need for Americans to “defend democracy” against “oligarchs.”
Sanders’ current stance contrasts with comments he made in 2021, when Twitter and Meta removed then-President Donald Trump from their platforms. At the time, Sanders wrote: “Let’s be clear. If Trump is too dangerous to send out a tweet or a Facebook post, he’s too dangerous to be commander-in-chief. Donald Trump must be removed from office immediately and held accountable for his horrific acts of sedition, violence and chaos.”
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