Instagram Deactivated our Account … For No Reason

What would you do if Instagram deleted your account? You were given absolutely no warnings whatsoever yet all the sudden your account was gone…just like that. All of the time you poured into curating your feed, the memories you created with each post, all of the friendships and connections you made–all completely wiped from Instagram…what would you do?

Last weekend this happened to us.

Grab the popcorn and wine guys, it’s time for a STORYTIME

Even though we post almost every day to our Instagram feed, we are definitely not as active as others and we are the first to admit it. Creating content and managing Navy’s Instagram is not mine nor Zach’s full-time job–and largely because of what happened last weekend, it never will be. Zach and I have other careers that we truly love outside of the social media, advertising, marketing, and public relations world.

We created Navy’s Instagram for fun. After a few short months of posting her puppy photos, her account really took off. Eventually we were able to capitalize on the time and energy we put into creating content and branch out to create a little business for our account. We’ve not only been able to develop a brand but travel to some incredible places with our dogs and meet some amazing people along the way.

At the end of the day, our Instagram is for entertainment purposes for us, our friends, and followers. In the past two years, we’ve filled our account with some of our favorite memories of with Navy and now puppy Duke. The posts along with the captions and comments truly bring me so much joy.

Setting the stage: A series of very ironic events

Looking back now the events leading up to our account being deactivated are a little ironic. The past two weeks have been really busy for Zach and I. I’ve been transitioning to a new job and Zach has been traveling more frequently. Because of this, we’ve taken a step back from social media in general.

To be completely honest with you all, Instagram stopped being fun for us lately. I felt like we were in this never ending cycle of pressure to post and create new content. What is so funny to me is that early last week, Zach and I sat down and decided we would close out whatever campaigns we were currently working on and not take on anything new for the rest of the summer. We even made the difficult decision to end our long term partnerships with two different brands. It was such a hard decision, but Zach and I wanted more time to focus on us and the pups and just have fun with Instagram again.

Occasionally, Navy’s Instagram account and our little business will come up in conversation and we are pretty open about what we do. Two weeks prior to our Instagram account being disabled I had several separate conversations with people about Navy’s account. I specifically remember telling a couple colleagues that I would never quit my job and pursue social media. Instagram is our largest platform and once we hit upload, we do not own the post, we do not own our followers, or hashtags, comments, or engagement. If Instagram shut down tomorrow, we would lose our biggest audience. Because of that, we would only continue Instagram as a hobby.

Participating in engagement pods, buying followers and likes, and running third-party bots on your account are all common reasons why Instagram will disable your account.

If you know anything about us or our account you know that we are 100% authentic on Instagram and this is something we pride ourselves in. There is such a market nowadays for people to buy followers. Heck, look at the TWO messages we receive just last week. It will only cost you $70 to buy 10k followers. Seems like a deal right? There are also several companies on that market that will run a bot on your Instagram accounts to automatically like, comment, and follow/unfollow other accounts.

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A few days prior to our account being deactivated, we were invited to join an engagement pod on Instagram. We don’t participate in engagement pods simply because we really don’t have the time to keep up with the daily requirements. What’s hilariously ironic to me is I literally have a blog post drafted titled “why we don’t participate in engagement pods”…strange, huh? I also have a blog blog post drafted about how our account is not growing on Instagram and why we really do not care. In this post we specifically talk about how we see so many people artificially growing their Instagram accounts and how unfair and dishonest it is. It goes without saying that we don’t buy followers or run bots to grow Navy’s account.

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Last Sunday I woke up and did what I normally do, log onto Instagram. As I was scrolling I was having trouble loading our feed. I figured there was some sort of error with Instagram so I completely logged out of the app. At the same time Zach asked me if I had blocked him on Instagram. Now, I absolutely rarely block people on Instagram so of course I told him he was crazy and went to check for myself, because I mean, who knows what happens after I have a glass or two of wine. When I attempted to load instagram again I was instantly signed out. I tried to log back into my account but received an error saying my account was deactivated for violating terms and conditions.

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I don’t think I could ever describe in words how I felt when I saw this. I instantly felt sick to my stomach. I am so embarrassed to admit this, but I started to sob. I laid on the couch for a good hour and just cried. I cried because I knew this was not right, this was unfair. I cried because I knew it had to be a mistake. I cried because I knew how much of a headache it would be to get my account back. Finally, I cried because I knew there was a possibility I would never get Navy’s account back with all our photos and memories.

Appealing our Deactivation

After a very emotional hour, I scoured the web for any article I could find about getting your account reactivated on Instagram. There are a lot of really great articles, however each article pretty much ends by saying you’ll likely never get in contact with someone from Instagram or Facebook and that you may never hear anything back about your account. I am not a very patient person, but throughout this entire process I could only be patient.

Instagram gives you the option to appeal your activation through the app. You are also able to appeal it through a desktop site as well. We did both… like, multiple times. When we appealed our deactivation through Instagram, we selected that we were a business account. By doing this we had to prove we were a legitimate business. Lucky for us, we are a registered business so we had all the proper paperwork on hand to upload to Instagram. Within a few minutes of submitting the appeal via the app, Instagram emailed us a code and asked us to write the code on a piece of paper along with our name and username and take a selfie and attach it to the email.

Of course we didn’t hear anything back after this email. As the articles instructed, we submitted our appeal forms multiple times a day. We were also given the advice to try to contact Instagram or Facebook through Facebook chat. Lucky for us, Navy’s Instagram is a business account which allowed us to run ads. We’ve invested in a couple of small ads before so our Instagram/Facebook Business account showed our ad history. Because of this I was able to start a chat with Facebook advertising customer service. To my knowledge this is the only way you can actually chat with someone who works at Facebook or Instagram unless of course you know someone who works there.

The first time I connected with someone on the Facebook advertising help chat, as soon as I mentioned my Instagram was deactivated they disconnected the chat and said they couldn’t help me. The second time I connected with someone, he actually took the time to listen to what I had to say and he provided me a little bit more insight. He did end the conversation by saying my account was not eligible to be reactivated. OUCH.

He did say that Navy was cute and he hopes that I can create new memories with her and document them on a new account and our loyal fans would follow her. Although I know this customer service rep was trying to be nice, it was really the hardest thing I had to hear. Because for us it’s never been about the followers. We keep our Instagram running to document Navy’s growth and now baby Duke’s growth.

Whenever I need a pick-me-up, I’ll scroll through our feed and look back at what we’ve done throughout the year how much we’ve grown and how much Navy has grown. I’ll read through the sweet comments of sweet messages that so many of you send us. I love looking at our tagged photos and seeing some of you who’ve met navy or you’ve created some sort of artwork for her or Duke and that brings me so much joy that I cannot even describe. Sure I have plenty of photos of Navy and Duke in my camera roll but you cannot replicate the memories that we have stored on Instagram.

Luckily, we have a separate Instagram account for Navy and Duke to repost videos from the stories on our main account so we weren’t completely wiped off the internet. Through our @navyandduke account we were able to notify a small amount of our followers to what happened. It was also so incredibly painful when we had people reach out to us via Facebook, email, or text and ask if we had blocked them or we had deleted our account. Sidenote: This was also a really interesting experiment because we got to see who was truly there for us and who may have only connected with us on Instagram due to our follower count.  When we reached out to a few of our Instagram “friends” from our @navyandduke account, a couple people left us on read.

The hardest part of this entire process was when we told people that Instagram deactivated our account (FOR NO REASON), many did not believe us when we told them we literally did nothing wrong. I felt a little embarrassed telling people our account was deactivated because I didn’t want anyone to even assume we did anything wrong. I didn’t want the thought to cross anyone’s mind that @navycorgi does shady things on Instagram (lol). We truly were just as confused as our online community was. And believe me, throughout this entire process I was racking my brain as to what I could’ve possibly done wrong to have my account be deactivated.

So what did we do?

Spoiler alert! We still do not know what we did wrong for Instagram to suddenly deactivate our account and we will never know. A little over 48 hours after our account was deactivated we received an email from Facebook support stating our account was reactivated and they apologized for the inconvenience. The email said we could now log back onto Instagram, yet it did take me about 5 tries to successfully log in.

Going forward we will still be taking a step back from Instagram. This entire situation further proves that you cannot solely rely on one single app for your business, income, advertising, happiness, communication, etc. I also strongly recommend that everyone creates some sort of second account for your page, whether it is a blog, a Facebook, YouTube, etc. Also, to download/back-up your Instagram feed monthly (this feature can be found in the settings section).

Over the past two-and-a-half years we’ve been on Instagram, we’ve made so many amazing friends and amazing memories. Honestly I don’t think we could have gotten our account back if it wasn’t for the amazing people who reached out to us and provided advice and support!