As I wrote on a past comment:

The real customer service for any Meta-related service is their legal department.

I've worked for a marketing firm whose clients (High End Fashion Industry in EU) were very prone to straddling the line regarding the Instagram ToS. If an account was disabled by some automatic trigger the lawyers would write/fax Meta asking for the account restoration, usually with no fuss on their side.

As you may guess, it wasn't exactly cheap. No idea if a lawyer may do something like that for you inexpensively or pro-bono given the nature of your app.

I travel a lot and this has happened to me several times. My business Instagram account was completely and irreversibly disabled because I tried to use it while in Thailand (I'm based in Vietnam).

My Google maps account was blocked also when traveling, but fortunately after several weeks I was able to get that one back.

With Instagram though I just had to make a new account. I also have a Meta Business account (business.facebook.com) and the Instagram account was linked there. The Facebook business account, pages were never blocked though, just the Instagram one.

Unfortunately after a few months I just had to accept it and make a new account. I hope you have more luck, but I assume it's the same with any Meta products. There is no support you can contact, no way to get redress. If it's possible, try to avoid using Meta products to build anything. I understand that's not always possible though, I run a bakery and absolutely must have both Google Maps and Instagram, much as I wish I didn't.

Remember that Whatsapp belongs to Mark Zuckerburg, not you, the users, or the developers. They can ban anyone for any reason at any time, and it does not need to be a good reason. There is no appeals court for corpotech.

This is a great lesson on the fragility of building businesses on private, centralized, and proprietary platforms.

It is a lesson I wish I learned a lot earlier in my career.

You see so many marketplace accounts suspended without a good reason that it seems like people are making more effort to get accounts suspended than meta makes to restore them.

I know someone who got suspended every day at 9 am for 50 to 70 days in a row. Every time there was a message with an appeal button. A few hours later everything was back to normal. Eventually the message didn't arrive. >the end<

There was also an alternative option to solve an issue with a product listing. There is no way to skip that if you don't have any listings.

Most interesting part were the days without any other activity on the account besides the ban/unban ritual.

They just made a new account and continued to but and sell similarly, no issues for over a year.

The trigger is not in the data(!)

I suggest you put a way of contacting you into your HN profile in case someone wants to help.

i have faced the same issue severally, opening different accounts that get suspended immediately with no activity and no clear reason of suspension. Very draining.

Someone find a Meta employee to submit an Oops.

I hope too,

I hope so

> Thanks in advance.

I understand the spirit of this post but this makes it sound like HN is FAANG's support forum. Maybe as a last resort it is, but too on the nose for me.

Honestly good luck. I left a company and removed myself from the meta account which triggered the deletion of our whole app. Impossible to recover. Meta suck.

My advice is to build such solutions around open products like Signal, XMPP or Matrix if possible. Or even Telegram.

On top of providing a better developer experience compared to Meta's ultra-locked and limited APIs, they aren't subject to the whims of a giant faceless company that can kill your product for no apparent reason with no chances of appeal.

Especially if you're doing these projects for folks in the developing world. Let's not lock them in proprietary American spyware like the whole West has already done :) from a user's perspective, if things are done properly, it'll just be a matter of installing another app.

And btw using a Matrix server with a WhatsApp bridge could also be a temporary solution to bypass the ban. But I haven't tested it with business accounts.

As a rule of thumb, getting access to human support is only a thing for paid accounts. If you just opened a free account and are not paying any money to Meta, Meta is rightfully not considering you a paid customer and is unlikely to spend valuable human time on you. I don't know why people think that internet-mediated services are free, you don't just jump on a train or coach for free.

Understand the feeling of being rug pulled. But you built something in another person’s walled garden, gotta be prepared to get kicked out anytime.

Perhaps channel your energy to building something else more stable, and stop adding value to Meta (because they really dgaf about you)

Thanks for what?

This is the way of the world. Unaccountable mega-corporations, the feudal lords of the modern world.

I hope the poster is able to reach Facebook / Meta and resolve this - but I wanted to, in fine HN tradition, go off an a related tangent - the recent Pycon keynote by Cory Doctorow - who’s pointed out that for decades the US has threatened economic sanctions (ie tariffs) against allies in order to get their way in things like digital markets.

But now the tariff gun has been fired there is little incentive not to make the digital global markets a level playing field - enforce open interoperability, reduce the cost of App Stores and so on - something that would enable a small entrepreneur in Kenya to build on top of a global spanning utility platform without fear or favour