Instagram users report getting stuck on unclosable "Your email address may not be secure" error, but there are some workarounds

Numerous Instagram users are currently unable to access the app due to an unclosable error pop-up. The message reads “Your email address may not be secure,” and you can’t click away from it.

There are various reports on Reddit about this issue, and a lot of them are unable to access their Instagram accounts. The pop-up gives you the option to add new contact information, but it doesn’t seem to work properly.

Hundreds of comments to the post linked above confirm that they’re facing similar problems. Some of the reports are four months old, and there are some from today as well, so the issue has been going on for a while.

Others note being interrupted while using the app and then seeing a black screen. All their activity has failed to load, and what followed was the email address security pop-up.

Clicking into it says “Page is unavailable right now,” or “This content is no longer available,” leaving users with no way to actually update or re-verify their email address.

A few were able to get to the verification code stage, but they report that it doesn’t go past that stage. Most people are stuck in a loop, where they can’t even use the app normally. The situation also has some worried whether they’ve been hacked.

If you’re affected by similar problems described above, I’ve browsed through Reddit, and there are fortunately some workarounds. The most popular one is going to this link in Incognito Mode or Private Browsing, and then changing the email and password associated with your Instagram account. Once this is done, you can log back into Instagram normally. Several posts on Reddit confirm that this fix works for them.

If you don’t want to do that, an alternative is to… wait three days and try logging in again. A few comments on Reddit claim that this helps. Since this is a bug on Meta’s end and not a user error, you can just choose to ignore it and wait a few days if you don’t use Instagram much.

You can also try to log in to your Instagram account from another device (one where you’ve never logged in before), and this apparently sends the email as expected. Meta typically doesn’t directly acknowledge such server-side errors, but they quietly get fixed on their own.

Meta apps in general have been really buggy this week, since a lot of people were unable to properly view posts on Instagram recently. You can read about that here.

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