On February 26, 2026, Meta's API began returning errors for Instagram Reel publishing requests. This affected all applications using their API, not just Buffer. The error came from Meta's infrastructure and wasn't related to any changes on our end.

Customer Impact

If you were publishing Instagram Reels during this window, those posts failed. About 10,000 reels were affected over the course of roughly 21 hours. Regular image posts and publishing to other platforms worked fine throughout.

Steps to Resolution

We confirmed the issue was on Meta's side by checking their API error codes and verifying that other platforms were seeing the same thing. We opened a case with Meta, updated our status page, suggested notification publishing as a workaround, and kept monitoring. Meta resolved the issue on their end by the morning of February 27, and we confirmed everything was back to normal before closing it out.

Key Learnings

One thing we noticed is that our alerting didn't trigger for this incident despite a significant drop in publishing success rates. We're investigating why and working on improving our monitoring so we can catch these kinds of failures faster in the future, even when the root cause is on a third party's side.