Instagram accidentally tells people Election Day is tomorrow

App blames error on a caching issue

Today is election day in the US, but some Instagram users were mistakenly told otherwise.

On Tuesday, a subset of the app's users saw a banner at the top of their feeds that read, "Tomorrow is Election Day." For some, the message was still there by Tuesday afternoon.

After being inundated with complaints about the outdated message, Instagram's PR team shared a statement on Twitter explaining that the mishap was due to a cacheing issue.

"While we turned off the 'Tomorrow is Election Day' notice last night, it was cached for a small group of people if their app hadn't been restarted," Instagram's statement read. "It's resolving itself as people restart. Today, people will get 'It's the Last Day to Vote' at the top of feed."

According to Protocol, an Instagram spokesperson declined to say how many users were affected by the caching issue. The spokesperson added that all users should receive accurate information via their notification centre soon.

Instagram's election day mishap comes as its parent company, Facebook, has attempted to crack down on voter misinformation. Last month, Facebook announced it would temporarily ban all political ads in the US after polls close on Tuesday — a move intended to limit confusion and misinformation on the platform in the days after the presidential election. Additionally, earlier this month, the company said it removed 120,000 posts across Facebook and Instagram that violated its voter interference policies.