Instagram has issued an apology after it reassigned a man's account to a famous Spanish soccer player without any warning or recourse. Andres Iniesta, an Instagram user in Madrid, posted about his experience to blog platform Medium, saying that he received a notice that he had violated the photo-sharing service's terms. Shortly thereafter he found that his account, @ainiesta, was now sending out pictures from another better-known Andres Iniesta — a player for FC Barcelona and Spain's national team.
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"What pains me is that all of this has happened without any explanation, not even a Twitter response from Instagram," the not-so-famous Iniesta wrote after unsuccessfully attempting to rectify the situation through various channels. His post became widely shared on social media — and soon thousands of other posts, comments and tweets called for Instagram to explain itself.
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Iniesta's story was posted on Sunday, and by Monday his account was restored — with an apology, but no explanation. "We made a mistake here and restored the account as soon as we learned about it," Instagram said in a statement.
"Our apologies go out to Mr Iniesta for the trouble we caused him."
The player, whose management told the BBC he had nothing to do with the account hijack, now uses the handle @ainiesta8.
