Instagram deleted the account of a designer called Andres Iniesta by 'mistake' and appeared to give it to the famous Barcelona soccer star with the same name

Andrés Iniesta, a designer who works in Madrid, has claimed Instagram shut down his account without warning and appeared to give it to the FC Barcelona soccer player of the same name.

Writing in a blog post on Medium, designer Iniesta said that last week he received an error message when trying to sign into Instagram, which said he had infringed the photo-sharing app's terms of use.

A couple of days later, his Instagram followers told him that they began seeing that the soccer player suddenly appeared on their "following" lists - even though some of them don't even like soccer.

Iniesta, the designer, said he made several attempts to contact Instagram, via Twitter and through its Facebook contact form, but he received no response.

He writes on Medium: "I consider that my rights (we still have some on the internet) have been violated somehow. I haven't done anything wrong and have lost not only my pictures, but being able to share important moments with my friends and family. What pains me is that all of this has happened without any explanation, not even a twitter response from Instagram. I'm not a celebrity, and I don't want to be one. I just don't like things being taken away from me."

Instagram provided Business Insider with this statement: "We made a mistake here and restored the account as soon as we learned about it. Our apologies go out to Mr. Iniesta for the trouble we caused him."

Business Insider also asked Instagram how the error occurred, but the company had no further information to add.

In an update to his original post, Iniesta said his Instagram account was restored 5 hours after publishing his original article on Medium. He also says the "player agency" responsible for Iniesta also contacted him and "promised me that they had nothing to do with this problem."