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LinktoDMdocs

Reconnect Instagram After a Password Change

Updated

Everything worked yesterday. You changed your Instagram password — or cleared a security checkpoint, or Meta prompted you to re-secure the account — and today nothing fires.

Instagram invalidates the access token when the password changes. “Error validating access token: the session has been invalidated” is Meta telling you the connection LinktoDM holds is no longer valid. The automations themselves are untouched; they simply have no permission to run.

It fails silently. There’s no email and no banner from Instagram — the first sign is usually a quiet day, which is why this one often goes unnoticed for a week.

Reconnect

Section titled “Reconnect”
  1. Log out of LinktoDM.
  2. Log back in and choose the same connection method you used originally — Instagram login or Facebook login. Switching methods here creates a second connection rather than repairing the first.
  3. Approve every permission Meta asks for. A partially approved reconnection looks successful and then fails at the first send.
  4. Publish nothing new — your existing automations resume on the restored connection.

Connect your Instagram account has the full flow if you need the screenshots.

Check these two afterwards

Section titled “Check these two afterwards”

A password change often takes more than the token with it.

Message access. Instagram frequently resets Allow access to messages to off when it re-secures an account. Comment automations may look fine while every DM fails — fix DM access disabled.

The queue. Anything that was waiting to send while the token was dead is still there. Open the In queue panel: if the count is high and the messages are now stale, clearing the queue is kinder than delivering a two-day-old reply to someone who’s forgotten they commented.

Then test

Section titled “Then test”

Comment your trigger word from a second account and confirm the whole chain runs — public reply and DM. A token restored without message access will pass the first half of that test and fail the second, which is exactly the state that sends people back to square one.