Instagram Shuts Down Popular Botting Service Instagress

Instagram has officially shut down one of the most popular botting services on the Internet. Instagress—the same service mentioned in two previous PetaPixel articles about the practice of “botting” to get likes, followers, and comments on Instagram—is officially defunct.

Visit the Instagress website a few days ago, and you were greeted by a cheery splash screen with the headline: “Get social media superpowers”:

Visit today, and you’ll find this message instead:

“Sad news to all of you who fell in love with Instagress: by request of Instagram we were forced to close our web-service that helped you so much in your Instagram journey,” reads the text. “We are all very sad of that but it looks like there is nothing we can do at the moment 😞”

The site is also offering refunds to users who would like to log in and request one.

Despite the tragic tone of the message and the sad face at the end, we can’t help but see this is as a big win for the good guys. Not only are these services against IG’s own Terms, they’re transparent, annoying, and just plain sad. If Instagram is finally closing down the bots, awesome! They can take their generic “Great shot *thumbs up*” and “So good!!! *clapping hands*” comments with them.