The platform said it was the result of a bug, but that it has already been fixed
Security researcher Saugat Pokharel discovered that Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for over a year! Saugat requested a copy of the photos and messages from his account on the app and received data that had been deleted more than a year earlier, proving that this information was never fully removed from the platform's servers.
It's not certain that the issue affected all of the network's users. Whenever we delete data from online services, there's usually an unspecified period of time before it's fully removed from the site's servers.
According to Instagram, it usually takes about 90 days for data to be fully removed from the servers, but that didn't happen this time. The platform stated that it was a bug and has since been fixed. The researcher was "rewarded" with US$6,000 for pointing out the issue.
According to a report by TechCrunch, Saugat discovered the bug in October 2019, and the issue was resolved in early August of this year: "We already fixed the issue, and we haven't seen any evidence of abuse. We thank the researcher for reporting this issue to us."
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