I recently created a PHP-Instagram API called phpinstagram and published it on github. I also set up this API on my own webserver and got quite high response as far as stats are concerned. Yesterday my service stopped to work and it seems as if Instagram is blocking my webservers IP-address.

My blog post about instagram was nothing new as @mislav already documented the unofficial instagram api very detailled.

Today @rennie72 tweeted me that my instagram api is not working anymore (thanks about that!).  I then started to try to fix the issue but unfortunately i could not reproduce the error locally. I put my code up on another server and tried to check if the error is because I made a mistake. But as the service works on my local machine and on another webserver I expect instagram to block my original webservers ip-address.

Instagram says in its faq that they are “interested in helping developers build on top of our platform”. But as it seems as if they block ip-addresses I cannot see how they help devs to build on their platform.

I looked onto my AWStats and found that i got 4.4k requests only to my api! I never got that much requests any time before! 🙂

Then i found out that my api was mentioned several times on the net (which I also didn’t know):

Somebody even wrote a request on instagrams zendesk which i cannot access.

All this motivates me to further improve the php-api! I will try to get some time free for this the next months! Lets home Instagram removes my Webservers IP from their block list 🙁