Every now and then, each Instagram marketer or anyone who uses the Follow/Unfollow strategy to grow their Instagram accounts gets this unpopular message from Instagram – the follow block. It happens for a variety of reasons, we will list them below along with solutions that will help you solve the follow blocks and avoid them in the future.

Here’s the message that you usually get : “It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been temporarily blocked from using it. We restrict certain content and actions to protect our community. Tell us if you think we made a mistake.”

First of all, don’t panic! It’s nothing serious and it can be avoided. Read on to see how to solve the Instagram follow block.

Why does the Instagram Follow block occur?

Those who are following Instagram users manually via the IG official phone application tend to follow a lot of profiles in a couple of minutes. This raises a huge flag with Instagram’s algorithm and they show you a message saying that “Action is blocked. We restrict certain content and actions to protect our community…”. This happens because they followed a lot of users (more than 60) in less than one hour. It’s understandable why users do this. You simply cannot take the phone every 60 minutes and follow just 60 users then repeat it. That would be exhausting and you wouldn’t have time for anything else. So, it’s easier to follow or try to follow more than 60, however, it’s frowned upon by Instagram and will most likely get you temporarily blocked from following. Those who use Instagram automation tools like Jarvee can also get blocks if they follow too fast, but that can easily be solved by using correct settings and making sure that the follow tool doesn’t follow more than 50-60 users per hour. Another reason that might cause a follow block is the IP or proxy if you use one for that account. Residential IPs (like your home IP) are the best you can use for your Instagram account, however, it’s not recommended to run more than 3 accounts on the same IP. If you do that, Instagram’s algorithm recognizes it and blocks actions from your IP. So, residential IPs are the best ones, but you still have to be careful with the number of actions you do and the number of accounts you run on them. Same thing happens to Instagram accounts on proxies, but they’re even more strict with proxies because even if you bought a private proxy, there’s a possibility that someone misused that proxy (IP) in the past and Instagram doesn’t wait long to issue an Action Blocked warning for it. If you are into black hat marketing and trying to promote offers like CPA (cost per action), follow block can easily occur if you don’t use a prelander or cloaked links and add direct CPA links to your profile. There are a couple of other types of links that Instagram does not allow like links to adult offers or shortened links that pay per view. Also, using same link for multiple Instagram accounts can lead to follow block Another type of block that you can experience if you are Jarvee user is “API Follow block”. If that happens, you will see this message displayed in the Summary tab. This kind of block can be caused by any of the reasons we mentioned above (aggressive following or bad IPs) but it also depends on how the Instagram account is created. Instagram marketers who run 10s or 100s accounts usually buy those accounts from sellers on social media and internet marketing forums. The sellers who create these accounts in bulk do not pay much attention to IP’s so sometimes they make 10’s of accounts on same IP or by using the same device and accounts are flagged from the very beginning. If you buy some of these you can experience API follow blocks even after doing just one follow action. Of course, that’s not the case with all sellers, there are very good ones, you just need to find them. We won’t promote any of them in this article, but feel free to comment below if you know any reliable one.

How to solve the Follow Blocked status if you are a Jarvee user

In case you do not use a proxy and get the “action blocked” message in the Tools section of Jarvee after you start the follow tool, you are probably using too aggressive settings and following too many users in a short period of time. In this case, you should stop the account for 24 hours and lower your settings.

If you have aged Instagram accounts with decent followers count use these tips:

Make sure you don’t follow more than 50-60 users per hour, add night mode for your Instagram accounts in order to avoid doing actions 24/7 and set daily max to 1000-1100 users. Avoid using Follow and Unfollow tool at the same time, especially if you are following 1100 users per day. Best practice is to follow for one day and then unfollow the next day or follow 500-600 for 12 hours and then unfollow the same number during the next 12 hours.

If your account is fairly new:

Use default settings for each tool in Jarvee to warm up the account. This should be done for at least one week. After that, you can start slowly increasing your settings each day until you hit your preferred numbers or the numbers we recommended in the above paragraph.

When getting an action blocked message and your settings are not aggressive, then it’s most likely the proxy’s fault. As I said before, proxies can be blacklisted by Instagram. In this case first thing you can try is: go to the Social profiles section in Jarvee, click on your Instagram account, scroll down and check Show Advanced settings. Then click on RESET DEVICE IDs at the bottom of the window. Verify the account in Jarvee again, wait for it to get a VALID status, turn on some tools like Story viewer for a couple of hours then try turning on the Follow tool again.

As already stated, bad links can also cause action – follow blocks. In this case you will have to remove this link from your profile and use a prelander on different domain or a cloaked link.

Sometimes Jarvee users can get blocked from following via API. If this happens, you can try these solutions:

Open the embedded browser for the account that got blocked from following via API. Follow one user through embedded browser, refresh the page and see if the follow stuck. If it sticks, close the embedded browser, go to Social profiles and click on that IG account. Then check “Show advanced profile settings” and check the box “Use embedded browser to follow when Action Blocked”. Restart the follow tool. You can turn this option on for each account that has issues with following. Check the screenshot below to find out where the option is located. In case that you still get the Follow Blocked message, all you can do is stop the account, wait for 24-72 hours, then change the proxy and verify the account in Jarvee again. After that turn on the follow tool and it should start working normally.

Conclusions on solving the Instagram follow block

Although we listed several potential reasons that might cause Action Blocked or Follow Blocked status, in most cases the reason is using Jarvee tools too aggressively. So, make sure you always stay within normal limits, don’t use only one or two tools in Jarvee, take advantage of all the tools that we offer like Story viewer, Follow Back tool, use Manage Comments and Direct Messages tool to engage with your followers and followings. Make sure you publish posts at least once or twice per day and avoid using the same Instagram account on multiple devices (on your phone and Jarvee). All this should make your account look more natural which will help you avoid not only Follow blocks, but also Like blocks and any other issues you might experience on Instagram.

Should you have other ideas on how to solve this block or if you’re still encountering problems and the above solutions don’t fully help you please comment below and we’ll try and solve it together! In case you’re experiencing like block check out this article to solve them.