Meta's AI Support Chatbot Became a Password-Reset Backdoor — 20,225+ Instagram Accounts Hijacked

TechCrunch·medium signal

Meta confirmed that a flaw in its AI-assisted account-recovery chatbot let attackers hijack at least 20,225 Instagram accounts between April 17 and early June 2026; asking the bot to change an account's email triggered a password-reset link to an unverified address. Meta only detected it on May 31 after high-profile takeovers (including a Space Force official and Sephora). The builder lesson is concrete: never wire an LLM support agent to privileged actions like account recovery without a separate, hard identity-verification path — agent convenience created a seven-week authentication bypass.