Hi babes,

If you’re reading this, I hope it’s because you are taking preventative measures and that this didn’t actually happened to you like it did to me. If it did happen to you, DON’T FREAK OUT. I’m going to walk you through what I did to get my account back in 24hrs with everything fully restored.

Here are things that can get you banned:

• buying likes

• buying followers

• posting repetitive content (same 30 hashtags in all posts; this makes you look like a bot)

• if you are spamming people & they report your account

Be polite on the internet. Don’t harass, post nudity etc.

First things first…

1. Don’t panic - there are so many bad things going on in the world. Google the news and you will see 3 stories of people who probably have it worse than you at this very moment. So be thankful.

2. Remember that Instagram owns the platform and it could shut down any day. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Do you have a blog? Youtube? Email list? Now’s a good time to get those things going if you don’t.

3. After you take the necessary steps to recover your account, take the day off of Instagram and enjoy the day without social media. I bet you will find some unexpected peace by not feeling like you need to constantly check the app.

Ok… Now into the nitty gritty…

I woke up at 9am that day & I had multiple text messages from my friends (thank goodness for those friends) who told me my account had disappeared. Of course I freaked out for a second, but then I took a breath and started to think of what I could do in that situation.

How to tell if you were hacked vs. disabled

FIRST: make sure you were not hacked. When Instagram asks you to submit a code, is it going to your phone number? Did you have two factor authentication on? Hacking is different then your account being shut down and requires different steps for recovery

• If you’re hacked, people will still be able to see your account. The hacker may have changed your name etc.

• If you’re disabled, no one will be able to find you and your account will come up as “user not found”

TIP: Make sure your email that people can contact you on your profile is different than your private email listed on your account. This makes it much harder for hackers to access your account.

TIP: Turn on two factor authentication right now if you don’t already have it turned on (and you still have access to your account

These were some of the messages I was getting when I was trying to log in:

Of course I was confused because I was getting so many different messages. The third photo was the actual error. So then I went and clicked “Need more help?" and it takes you to a form to fill out. In my opinion, this form was not very helpful in helping get my account back, but none the less, you can fill it out:

So after I filled this form out multiple times, I wanted to make sure that I was doing everything I could. Off to the internet I went. There are a few articles about what you can do.

How to fix this

• Go to this link: CLICK HERE

  • This will take you to the form to appeal the deactivation.

• Fill out the form with all the information

• Make sure you put the correct email in each spot

So restoring your account is entirely up to Instagram. Yes this can be very stressful, but if you didn’t do anything wrong, you shouldn’t be too worried.

How to talk to an actual person

This next step is a little tricky. Essentially, I found a way to get in contact with an actual human at Facebook to see if they could give me any insight and it helped me so much.

To get to support the quickest, click HERE

So essentially, in order to talk to someone, you have to work the system. Here’s what I did:

1. Go to Facebook

2. Go to your ads manager (top right corner of the home page > drop down arrow > manage ads(make sure you’re on the right business account if you have multiple))

3. Get to the help center (click the question mark in the top right corner, all the way at the bottom is the help center)

4. Contact support & keep everything ad related

   *What you are trying to do is say that you cannot run an ad / promote a post on your IG because it’s disabled. They will look into it because of this

5. When answering the questions, at the bottom of step 2 you have to option to chat with a representative

6. start chat (again, mention that you cannot promote / post an ad because your account is disabled and you’re not sure why)

Here is the conversation that I had with my representative. REMEMBER: Kindness goes along way. These people don’t have control of your account nor can they disable it so there is no point in getting angry or frustrated with them. They are doing the best they can.

So this was helpful for me because she was able to tell me that it would take 24-48 hrs to review the appeals that I had submitted via Instagram instead of me wondering how long my account was going to be down for. Whatever you do, do not go on reddit because people just share their horror stories and that’s most likely not going to happen to you.

I hope this blog post helped resolve your issue or prepare you just in case it does happen. Remember, Instagram isn’t everything and if you open your news for the day, I’m sure you can find 5+ people who had something worse happen to them. Also, Instagram can delete whatever they want, whenever they want. They don’t owe you anything for their free platform. Build up your other social channels and don’t solely rely on the gram.

Xoxo,

Allysa