Did You See Strangers In Your Instagram Stories? It Was A Bug To Blame On

In the latest incident, Instagram users are seeing things on Stories from people they don’t follow.

The news, initially reported by TechCrunch, was reported by a Twitter user that said there were strangers popping up in his Stories Tray. The user was confused and decided to investigate. As shown in the following screenshot, Instagram’s Stories Tray shows people that the users don’t follow, that’s why you see the Follow button remaining active on their profiles.

After some inquiry was done, it was confirmed by Instagram that a bug caused this issue but the company has fixed it.

Although Instagram said the problem was fixed within hours, it is still investigating the cause of this bug. Fortunately, after users tapped on the profile picture of a user they don’t follow in Stories, the platform’s privacy control would not display the content anymore.

The bug didn’t impact Facebook Stories. However, this incident has once again questioned users about how the social giant is competently routing and safeguarding their data, including the 500 million daily users on Instagram Stories.

A spokesperson of the company stated:

The latest incident surfaces when Facebook had a difficult year with its privacy and security teams. Apart from every effort it’s making to combat fake news and secure elections, the platform, and its Instagram have undergone a number of technical troubles. Previously, while a bug on Facebook exposed unposted photos of 6.8 million people, another one changed the status update composer privacy setting of as many as 14 million accounts. And just last month, the world-leading social network experienced an outage lasting for hours. Meanwhile, an Instagram bug caused follow counts to decrease.