The No Kings Coalition says that even after the account was visible again, they couldn't access it for hours.

Meta, the owner of Instagram, apologized for disabling an Instagram account run by No Kings Coalition, the organizers of the No Kings Day political rallies held across the country on Oct. 17.

Meta’s vice president of communications, Andy Stone, posted about the events on X the day of the rallies, with a follow-up message the next day. Stone said the blackout lasted about an hour in the middle of the protests and was an accidental shutdown caused by the engineering team’s automated systems detecting a traffic spike.

Specifically, the team detected a Claude AI tool reading profiles, posts and hashtags at an unusually high rate.

“It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account,” Stone wrote.

A representative for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

The timing and duration of the outage were criticized by the No Kings Coalition, which wrote about it on the restored account.

“Even after visibility was restored, we still had no access to the account for hours,” the post read. “Meta still owes us an explanation. Restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable.”

As of Monday afternoon, the Instagram post had more than 70,000 likes. A representative for the No Kings Coalition did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Saturday’s rallies took place a year after the group’s 2025 events, when protests were organized in 2,500 cities .

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