Story

I tried to reach support and all kinds of feedback channels, to no avail. I know this kind of post does not work well on HN, but I have nowhere else to try, so I figured I would give it a shot.

When you share a Reel from the mobile app, it gives links such as

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTAcc_gE7J7/ (tracking parameters removed)

When you open this link on the web (you MUST log in first, sorry), it straight up does not work.

It will: first redirect to `/reels/` (with an extra s. both should work in general), and then it will either

get stuck on a white page and, for some reason, make my CPU fan run like crazy;

give up and just redirect to your reel timeline, i.e. a random video that is not `/DTAcc_gE7J7/`.

This does not happen for all Reel links, but for a non-trivial number, if not most, of them.

The only workaround is to manually change the link to `/p/{post_id}` and open it as a post (which has a different, worse UI because the video canvas is very small).

This has been broken for at least weeks, and I found people talking about it on Twitter too. But time has passed and no fix is coming.