The troubles with Pinterest and getting locked out (#fail)

Have you ever experienced a situation with Pinterest where you made a mistake an entered your password wrong one too many times? The result is getting locked out of your account until you reset your password with them (as their site suggest an email will be dispatched with instructions). However, have you also experienced a situation where that email never came?

You are not alone as there are others, and the really crappy part of it all, is you may not be able to get back in (ever). We have heard others having this issue but never ran into it ourselves–until now. One of our own had the issue with Pinterest, originally caused by incorrectly entering the password a number of times via their phone (little touch keyboard resulted in typos). You are then greeted with an error upon trying to login…

“Your account has been suspended. We’ve sent you an email with more info, including how to get in touch.”

Kind of a bad choice of words to say “suspended” since it sounds more like a form of discipline than a security concern for one’s account. Of course to make things worse, the email never came. So there was no way to reset the password or get into touch with Pinterest the easy way. They then attempted to reach out via the website by clicking on the “help” link at the bottom. They explained everything that had happened in great detail hoping to clear the mess up. How they mistyped the password one too many times, how the email never came through and how the website’s reset password box won’t submit when they entered the password (but it will if they entered anything else into it at random, even when they typed an email into it that clearly doesn’t exist).

They used the same email for the support as is associated to the account and whammo, the confirmation of the support request came through. So email between Pinterest and their email server (a company email at that) can shake hands just fine. So it comes into question, did the initial email from the logins even fire off to begin with?

Now things get worse. After all of the effort to explain the situation, the reply back from them had absolutely nothing to do with the support request. Literally, nothing. Let’s take a look at their response…

Hi (the name on the account),

This is an automated response from Pinterest.

We block links if we think they might be spammy or unsafe. To make sure a link doesn’t get blocked:
– Check that the link goes directly to the website, not through a URL shortener (like bit.ly) or redirector
– Pin with our official Pin It button https://pin.it/ZWpggVx

In some cases, we do block a website completely. If you think we made a mistake, respond to this message with the following information:
1. A link to your website or blog
2. A link to a pin that’s showing you the block error

The Pinterest support team

The support request had nothing to do with a link being blocked, and their solution for everything involves pinning something (which is kind of difficult to pin something anyway if you can’t access your account). So they replied back (as it requests) explaining that this has nothing to do with the issue at hand and explained things even further. Since then, they haven’t been able to get a single response from Pinterest. The account is effectively dead. No one to get into touch with; their fancy website failing at every option presented; and they can’t even view the account as typing the URL to the account leads to a cannot be found error.

So lesson to be taken here: Do not mistype your password ever when trying to log into Pinterest. Your account will actually be “suspended” and even taken offline. They may or may not send you an email on how to fix it like it claims, and if they don’t, you won’t be able to get into touch with a single soul. So double and triple check that information before you hit the button, or you too might find yourself with this headache.

Now, we can say we have actually seen this happen.