Instagram “You Cannot Like this Media” 400 status code

Question

I am aware that the Instagram API was down a few hours ago, but it seems to be back up now. The problem is, when we post data to Instagram saying to like a specific photo, w

Answer 1

I've run into the same thing and I found that there were three cases where I received this error:

1. The photo has been deleted. If you are caching media data and trying to like it later this could come up.
2. The user is private. You can't like a photo if the user is private and they haven't given you permission to follow them.
3. You've done too much liking with the public API. If you try to like a photo and find that it's neither deleted nor is the user private, then Instagram has put a temporary ban on your account from liking via the api. I'm not sure what triggers this other than excessive liking. You'll need to wait up to a week without making any high-volume likes via that access token for the timeout to expire (although you can to a test every once in a while to see if this timeout has expired).