A popular Twitch streamer known as 'SquidGame' said she was temporarily barred from Instagram after fans of the Netflix series may have mass-reported her account

• A Twitch streamer said she was temporarily barred from using her @squidgame Instagram account.
• Lydia Ellery has been using the handle @squidgame on Instagram since 2012.

A Twitch streamer who owns the Instagram handle @squidgame said she believed the platform temporarily banned her account because fans of the Netflix show "Squid Game" mass-reported it or tried to gain access to it.

Lydia Ellery, who also uses the @squidgame handle on Twitch, tweeted on Thursday that she'd lost access to her Instagram account. Ellery has been posting on the account since November 2012.

Ellery has 42,300 followers on Twitch, where she's a member of the platform's Partner Program. She's also part of Yogscast, a streaming collective with over 7 million YouTube subscribers.

"I think so many people have been trying to log into my account or reporting it (squidgame) that instagram have banned me," she tweeted. "Very not cool."

Mass-reporting is the practice of many users reporting an account to trigger the platform's automated banning system. There's no evidence it actually works, though reports have described it being used as a tactic.

Ellery said in a tweet on Saturday that she'd been "inundated with messages" from fans of the Netflix hit series on Instagram.

Ellery told Insider in an email on Monday that she had made it back into her account but that an automated message from Instagram when she tried to log in said her account had violated the platform's policies against "pretending to be someone else." (Insider reviewed a screenshot of the message taken by the streamer.) Ellery said she had not corresponded with Instagram about the ban.

Instagram has not responded to Insider's inquiry about why Ellery's account was taken down.

Ellery said fans were still messaging her because they were "angry" that she had the account or wanted it for themselves.

Several comments on Ellery's latest posts referenced "Squid Game," with some users appearing to ask her to give them her handle.

"Squid Game," which debuted on Netflix on September 17, has soared to the platform's top spot in the US. Netflix's co-CEO Ted Sarandos has said the series is on track to beat "Bridgerton" to become Netflix's biggest show of all time. The Korean-language drama follows people in extreme debt who enter a competition involving deadly versions of children's games for the chance to win a massive cash prize.

On Friday, a Reddit user posted about Ellery's account issues in the popular subreddit r/LivestreamFail. Ellery said the post became No. 1 on Reddit's front page that day. As of Monday, the post had 59,000 upvotes.

In the tweet on Saturday, Ellery thanked followers for helping spread the word about her account.

"Not sure what to do about my SquidGame name and it being reported/inundated with messages," she said, "but hopefully this won't happen again!"