Itβs a pretty scary thought. The idea of one day waking up to find all the serious long hours and hard work youβve spent in building up your Instagram account and IG community disappeared overnight. Gone, with no cut-through in the attempts to contact Instagram and get it back. Which is exactly what happened to @guguidebaliβs Lani Elderfield earlier this week.
Waking up to messages from friends, followers, and businesses letting her know her account had disappeared, Lani logged in to find a message from Instagram saying: βLooks like you requested to delete this accountβ. But despite this not being the case, Lani has been unable to talk to anyone to get it sorted, explaining: βThe trouble with Instagram is itβs such a large business that itβs literally in their policies and terms and conditions that they donβt offer support β itβs just too big.β
Opening up about the situation in a Facebook Live post, Lani admits: βI started the account at its first post and organically built that following from one up to 45.5K followers β so to wake up and to have that completely gone, disappeared, vanished is pretty scary.
But despite the set back, Lani has a pretty positive message to anyone in the same boat: Donβt give up β just get back on the horse! While still attempting to retrieve the old account, she has started a back-up account @cangguguide, revealing: βWeβre just getting the word out there that weβre going to have a new home for a while and not getting overwhelmed. And I guess we want to use this as a warning to everybody that this happens. Itβs pretty freakish!
βI was thinking about it in a business sense β and itβs literally like, imagine if Gu Guide was a cafΓ© and somebody came into the cafΓ© overnight and burned it down. But if that cafΓ© makes the best carrot cake and the best coffee, itβs not like youβre going to stop going there β youβre just going to wait until they open in a new location or rebuild. Itβs not the end of the world, itβs going to be alright. As much as I wanted to pack it up and be like βwoh is me, why has this happened?β Itβs going to be totally fine.β
Loving that positivity.
Main image:Β @cangguguide
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What probably happened was that the account was hacked and deleted.
You should create a new account with a strong password and consider using Instagram’s 2-Factor Authentication feature.