For a while now, I have been helping along a journey to recover an Instagram account, unsuccessfully.
As with so many websites it is an infuriating process of stumbling through a set of pages alternatingly labelled “helpcenter” and “support”, until you realize that their links just go in circles. They have apparently done everything in their power to not give you a way to talk to a human, and to make you question your sanity while you slowly lose your hope of finding a way to speak to someone. The “I Can’t Log In” page for example literally links to itself in case you wish to “learn more.”
Now at some point I got the hint that it is possible to just pay your way out of this, and you can get “Meta verified” for support with real humans. I understand why you have to pay for support, maybe otherwise they would get flooded with requests. But what I don’t understand is why their paid support is so useless. The low point was talking to a German support agent, who in the typically German service-mindset of “this is not my problem” chose to point out how this is actually our own fault. Fantastic. Are you going to help now? This chat ended with them sending us a link to the helpcenter that we already knew about after they had made a decision that they are not going to do anything about it. Glad to be paying for this!
I then had the smart idea of setting the account we are using to English. All of my personal stuff is set to English, and I of course also tried to go through the instagram support exercise, and found it to be much more pleasant. Setting it to English means we get someone who at least understands what their job is. We then finally got someone from their off-shored support team to file a ticket for the team for account retrieval. This process was excruciatingly painful: You can only go through customer support via chat in the instagram app. There is no way to do this on a computer. It’s not the regular instagram chat. It’s a special chat. That chat doesn’t have a scrollbar. You can’t see previous messages, and cannot read it if they write more than what you can see on screen. If you type into the message field, your keyboard hides the message box. It always swallows the first character you type, which is extra fun when you also can’t see what you are typing. The “send screenshot” button doesn’t work, which of course you only find out when the support agent asks you for a screenshot. But at least there is a prominent “heart” button which sends big, pink hearts. When you leave the chat screen to enable notifications for instagram so you see their answers (because otherwise you don’t get any notification! Nothing! No e-mail, nothing!), there is a 50/50 chance that the support chat is just gone. Not a trace, no list of active support cases, just nothing. Thankfully, you at least get an e-mail with your support ticket ID in the very beginning, but then again I have no idea whether I will ever be able to check that support ticket again, because the chat disappeared. (Note: My personal phone with my personal instagram behaves differently and shows a list of support cases – but it’s also showing a completely different set of prices and support options.)
Here is the situation: We have a meta-verified account that is linked to the Instagram account we are trying to recover. (They can’t help you if you ask from an account that is not linked to the one you inquire about.) The account we’re trying to recover prominently links to a website we have full control over, and that website is obviously synonymous with the account. The account lists a business on it as well. Any human with a working brain should be easily convinced who the owner of that account is. My main takeaway from this is that it’s irresponsible to build on a platform you don’t have control over. Thanks for reminding me of that, Meta.