Former President Barack Obama’s Instagram account hacked

Adam Downer Mon, June 1, 2026 at 5:18 PM UTC

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Barack Obama‘s Instagram account was hacked on Sunday, May 31, by unknown culprits.

The former president’s official White House account, @obamawhitehouse, posted AI-generated images and messages written in Arabic for several hours on Sunday before the account was restored to its normal state. One of the posts read, “The White House is under Shiites’ control.” Some of the images were screenshotted and printed by TMZ before they were deleted.

Meta confirmed to the publication that the hacked posts were scrubbed and the account was restored to its original state.

Obama, 64, had not used the account, which has over 2.4 million followers, since leaving office in January 2017. His last post there was a celebration of his eight years in office.

His personal Instagram account, which has over 42 million followers, was not affected by the hack. His last post there was a Memorial Day tribute to fallen soldiers.

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Obama has been hacked before. In 2020, his Twitter account was breached along with the accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Joe Biden as part of a Bitcoin scam. The hacker, Joseph James O’Connor, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2023 and forced to repay $5.40 million of stolen Bitcoin in 2025.

Since leaving office, Obama has made minimal public appearances. In a May interview with The New Yorker, he revealed he chooses to only occasionally speak about American politics in order not to dampen the effect of his message.

Still, he has been unusually visible in recent months. He made high-profile speeches supporting Democratic gubernatorial candidates in the 2025 elections and supported Virginia’s redistricting efforts. In May, he chatted with Stephen Colbert about Colbert’s presidential bona fides and his theory on the existence of aliens.

Obama caused controversy earlier this year when he said he believes aliens exist, but he hadn’t seen them. The statement sparked conspiracies that the government was covering up proof of alien life, but Obama countered by saying that the government is awful at keeping secrets.

“I promise you some guy guarding the installation would have taken a selfie with one of the aliens and sent it to his girlfriend to impress them. It would leak,” he quipped to Colbert.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”