Someone changed my Instagram password: how to get back in

If your Instagram password has stopped working, the route back is a dedicated page Instagram runs for exactly this, and it works best from the phone you normally use. That last part is not a small detail. The same recovery that takes a few minutes in the app on your usual phone can turn into days of identity checks in a browser on a borrowed computer.

Last checked: 15 August 2026. Every official Facebook, Instagram and Australian government link on this page was opened and confirmed working on that date. If you find one that no longer works, please tell us and we will fix it, because a dead link on a page like this is worse than no page at all.

Check your email before anything else

If the email address on the account was changed as well, Instagram sends a notice to your original address, and that message contains a link that reverses the change. It is much the fastest way back and it expires, so spend two minutes searching your inbox and junk folder now.

The page you want

If the code is not arriving

Check the junk folder first. If nothing comes at all, the contact details on the account have probably been changed, which is a slower route but still a real one.

That case is here: the hacker changed my Instagram email and phone.

Instagram's own page for the general case is I cannot log in.

Once you are in

1. Change the password, and change it anywhere else you used the same one. If that password was also on your email or your banking, those come first, before the social account.
2. Check the recovery email address and phone number on the account and remove anything you do not recognise. This is the step people skip, and it is the reason accounts get taken a second time a week later.
3. Sign out of all other sessions, so a device the attacker is still holding gets kicked off.
4. Turn on two factor authentication, so a stolen password on its own is no longer enough.
5. Look at what was posted or sent while they had it, so you know what your friends and family received.
6. Tell the people who were messaged, ideally somewhere other than the account that was taken.

The messages that are about to arrive

Instagram is where recovery scammers work hardest, because a public post saying you have been hacked is easy to find. Expect offers of help within hours, and treat every one of them as a scam.

• Anyone offering a phone number. There is no Meta support line. A number is the clearest single sign you are being scammed.
• Paid recovery agents. Services that promise to get your account back for a fee. They have no access Meta does not give you for free, and the usual outcome is that you pay and nothing happens.
• Anyone who messages you offering to help after you post that you have been hacked, especially on Instagram. Watching for those posts is exactly how they find people.
• Anyone asking for an upfront fee, a gift card, a voucher or a cryptocurrency payment. No legitimate service is paid this way.
• Anyone asking for your password or your two factor code. No real Meta process ever asks a person for these. Sharing the code is how the second theft happens.
• Anyone asking to remote control your computer to fix it for you, unless it is somebody you already know and trust.
• A friend asking you to receive a code for them. That friend has already been taken over, and the code is for your account.

Related pages on this site

• Start at the router , if this is not quite your situation.
• There is no Meta phone number , and what the numbers really are.
• Paid recovery services , why none of them are real.
• The full Instagram page .
• Password managers explained simply .