Continuous Reposting Loop for Standalone Instagram Integration - Risk! Account flagged by Instagram for bot-like activity and disabled permenantly

[anvimotions]

📜 Description

When using Postiz with a standalone Instagram integration, posts made via the "Post Now" button are successfully sent to Instagram — but Postiz fails to mark the post as complete (PUBLISHED).
This results in the same post being sent repeatedly, creating a loop that triggered Instagram’s bot detection and nearly got the account blocked.

👟 Reproduction steps

1️⃣ Add a standalone Instagram integration (via Postiz’s integration settings - followed exact instruction as per postiz documentation).
2️⃣ Create a post using "Post Now".
3️⃣ Use either:
AI-generated image + caption
OR manual upload + custom caption

4️⃣ Observe:
Post is continuously published to Instagram till the post is deleted manually from postiz calendar and postiz application is shutdown.
Post stays in QUEUE state in the Postiz DB.
Worker keeps retrying the same post endlessly and multiple posts are published on instagram till post application is closed, post from calendar is deleted. This is very high risk, since Instagram will try to flag the account as "bot" and disable it permanently.

👍 Expected behavior

✅ After a successful post:
Postiz should mark the post as PUBLISHED.
Worker should stop retrying.
Only 1 post should appear on the instagram account

👎 Actual Behavior with Screenshots

❌ Postiz keeps the post in QUEUE.
❌ Worker keeps retrying → multiple identical posts appear on Instagram.
❌ Manual deletion of post in calendar + app shutdown required to stop it.

💻 Operating system

Windows

🤖 Node Version

latest image pulle

📃 Provide any additional context for the Bug.

Self-hosted Postiz latest Docker image
Standalone Instagram integration
No AutoPost rules configured
Issue observed consistently across AI and manual posts

Impact
Causes repeated posting of the same content.
Account flagged by Instagram for bot-like activity.
Requires manual DB intervention to stop retries.

Additonal info
tokenExpiration valid (token not expired)
refreshNeeded is false
Integration and posts appear normal at DB level except state remains QUEUE
Similar reports not found on GitHub or Reddit

👀 Have you spent some time to check if this bug has been raised before?

• I checked and didn't find similar issue

Are you willing to submit PR?

None

[nevo-david]

Hi @anvimotions,
I tried to repeat all your steps locally, post was successful and marked as PUBLISHED.
is it possible you haven't configured something right? maybe some missing permissions?

[anvimotions]

@nevo-david everything seemd fine to me, is there something specific I should check on my side?. One of my account got blocked because of the issue. I checked in Auotpost database and seems post is stuck queue. Also I noted another issue which I have reported about multiple accounts getting created even if you share member link and provide same organisation name. I have no clue how to proceed.

[anvimotions]

Hi @nevo-david ,
with help of git hub copilot :) , I tried to do some debugging.
✅ I’ve traced PostsService.postSocial. The logic only calls updatePost if:
The post is in QUEUE.
this.socialApi.publish(post) succeeds and returns result.

❌ In my case:
The post is published to Instagram (I see it live).
But Postiz doesn’t mark it as PUBLISHED, so it retries endlessly.

👉 I suspect:
Either this.socialApi.publish(post) throws after publishing.
Or the result is incomplete (id or url undefined), causing an error or skip before updatePost.

➡ Could you help confirm what conditions postSocial expects in the Instagram standalone response? I can try to provide logs if that helps.

Here is the relevant code for PostsService.postSocial and the conditions that can prevent updatePost from being called:
async postSocial(post: Post) {
// Condition 1: Early return if post is not in QUEUE state
if (post.state !== 'QUEUE') {
return;
}

try {
// ... code to publish post to social platform ...
const result = await this.socialApi.publish(post);

// Condition 2: If publish fails and throws, updatePost is skipped
await this.postsRepository.updatePost(post.id, result.id, result.url);

} catch (error) {
// Condition 3: Any error before updatePost will skip the call
this.logger.error('Failed to publish post', error);
// updatePost is not called here
}
}

Summary of conditions that prevent updatePost from being called:

1. Post is not in QUEUE state:
   The method returns early and skips updatePost.
2. Error during publishing:
   If this.socialApi.publish(post) throws an error, the catch block is executed and updatePost is not called.
3. Any other early return or thrown error before the updatePost call.