NEW YORK — Some Instagram posters received a shocking notification from the app on Wednesday: Certain photos have been permanently deleted from the app’s Stories archives and cannot be recovered.
“This story is no longer available,” some users saw on certain Stories. “Due to a technical issue, this story is no longer available. While we’ve since fixed this issue, your story can’t be restored.”
Meta, which owns Instagram, declined to share how many users were affected, but said only the people whose Stories were lost will see the notice.
“We found and fixed a bug that caused some people’s Story highlights and archives to be deleted. Unfortunately, we are unable to restore these Stories and we’re letting people know in the app if they’re impacted,” a Meta spokesperson said Wednesday.
Meta said the black screen showing the error message would be gone by July 2025.
Instagram Stories are a more casual, less committing form of posting. Users can upload photos, videos or text posts that disappear in 24 hours. More exclusive content can go on a curated Close Friends list or can permanently be placed on your profile as a story highlight.
Stories differ from normal pictures, as they’re often personalized with music, gifs, text, filters and interactive features like polls. Many users treat their Story Archives as a photo diary — ranging from memes, screenshots of Spotify songs to show off music taste, to chill poolside photos from a beach vacation. Instagram even shows “memories” in the archives tab, pulling up an old story from what the user did on that day from past years. Some people also use Story Archives as a way to store pictures and videos.
Instagram doesn’t automatically save stories to your camera roll — instead, they are auto uploaded to the Story Archives, which is what the bug affected along with the Story Highlights.
The bug serves as another reminder that relying on a single backup method for media can be a bad idea. For important memories, people should ensure they back up photos, videos and other media outside of an app, no matter how trustworthy the company may be.
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