Some Instagram platforms received a shocking message from the app on Wednesday that users' photos have been permanently deleted from their Stories archives and cannot be retrieved, CNN reports.
"This story is no longer available," is the warning users have seen with certain stories.
"Due to technical issues, this story is no longer available. Although we have since fixed this issue, your story cannot be restored," Instagram said.
Meta, which owns Instagram, declined to share how many users were affected, but said only people whose stories were lost would see the notification.
"We found and fixed a bug that was causing some people's story highlights and archives to be deleted. Unfortunately, we are unable to reproduce these stories and will notify people in the app if they are affected,” a Meta spokesperson said on Wednesday.
Meta said that the black screen with the error message will disappear by 2025. in July
Instagram Stories are a more casual, less-committal form of online advertising.
Users can upload photos, videos or text posts that disappear within 24 hours.
More exclusive content can be found in a separate "Close friends" list.
Stories are different from regular pictures because they are often personalized with music, gifs, text, filters, and interactive features like polls.
Many users treat their story archives as a photo diary, from memes to screenshots of Spotify songs to showcase their taste in music.
Instagram even displays "memories" in the archives tab, pulling an old story from what the user did that day from years ago.
Some people also use story archives as a way to store photos and videos.
Instagram doesn't automatically save Stories to your camera roll unless users enable the setting — instead, they automatically upload to Story Archives, which was affected by the bug along with Story Highlights.
This error is another reminder that relying on a single method of creating backup media can be a bad idea.
For important memories, people should make sure to back up photos, videos, and other media outside of the app, no matter how reliable the company is.
