Amber Lancaster warned her friends, fans, and followers about a strange online occurrence affecting her.
The Price Is Right model has appeared on the CBS game show since 2008, just one year after Drew Carey took over as host.
During her time on the game show, she’s also appeared in various television roles, including HBO’s Entourage, MTV’s The Hard Times of RJ Berger, and CBS soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.
She’s also amassed a significant social media following, with over 500,000 followers on her Instagram, more than the other models and Drew.
On Tuesday, she panicked after witnessing something weird and scary happening with her direct messages on the platform.
Others seemingly experienced a similar issue with Instagram, and Amber later updated fans about what happened.
TPIR model warned fans that ‘weird’ messages were not from her
In a series of Instagram Story videos, Amber spoke about some cryptic messages from her Instagram. She explained that they’d show up as auto-replies whenever someone sent her a direct message.
“I don’t know what’s going on with my Instagram, but if someone messages me, it is like auto-replying all this crazy text that looks like a bug. Like a virus or something,” she said in her video with an IG screenshot showing lines of code.
“Just know it’s not me. I don’t know what the h**l’s going on,” she said.
“I need to change my password but I’m scared to log out. What if I lose my account?” she asked.
In a second slide from her IG Story, shared by the celebrity fan account below, Amber revealed lines of code appearing as Instagram messages in a text conversation between her and a friend.
“Apparently I’m not alone,” she wrote, adding, “I think we unlocked the Matrix.”
A mysterious Instagram message ‘glitch’ affected Amber and others
As Amber applied eyeliner in another Instagram Story video, she updated her fans, followers, and friends about the earlier warning for IG messages.
“The weird automated message thing, I guess, was an Instagram glitch thing that is now fixed,” she said in her clip, joking, “I’m gonna blame the drones.”
Others on social media expressed concern and frustration after experiencing or learning of the Instagram DM glitch.
In an X post (above), an individual sent “prayers” to those affected by the Instagram DM glitch.
“Who got the weird Instagram DM glitch last night,” a user on X asked, including a screenshot of the strange code.
A recent Reddit forum post discussed the “broken auto reply” on Instagram. Some claimed they were unsure how to fix it or asked what was happening.
The original post creator commented that it “must have been a bug” and seemed resolved.
Last Wednesday, a significant social media outage affected Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp platforms. According to the New York Post, Meta had fixed the issues as of that evening.
As of this writing, it’s unclear how widespread the Instagram DM glitch Amber mentioned to her followers was.
Meta, which owns Instagram, had not provided any support updates about the platform’s recent message glitch.