Hacked Ottawa gym lost 11 valuable years of social media

After spending more than a decade building a social media following around her local business, Iron North Studio owner Jenna Ladd says it only took a matter of minutes for it to all come crashing down.

While enjoying a day off at Saunders Farm with her family on Thanksgiving Monday, she said her fitness studio’s social media was hacked, taken over and permanently deleted before she realized what was happening.

Suddenly finding herself without a way to connect with the thousands of followers she relies on to bring revenue to her studio, she’s now picking up the pieces from what she describes as “a digital house fire.”

“One minute everything is standing and fine, and you feel safe, and then you turn around and everything has burned down with no chance of support,” she said.

Looking back, a WhatsApp notification would have been her first and only clue. While walking around Saunders Farm, she remembers reading a message on her phone warning her of “suspicious activity” on her Facebook account.

But, considering she’s never been contacted by Meta over WhatsApp, and considering the “suspicious activity” should have automatically triggered a suspension on her Meta-verified account until she could verify her identity, she didn’t think to take it seriously.

“And then I just put my phone away,” she recalled.

But, when she opened her phone later that afternoon, she said she was immediately hit by a slew of notifications from Meta, and by that point it was already too late.

The first message warned her of suspicious activity on her Facebook and Instagram accounts. The next one said she’d been removed as the manager of her fitness studio’s Meta business suite. Then she was told the account had been suspended for violating the terms of service.

Another message, timestamped one minute later, stated that an appeal of the account suspension had been rejected.

As a result, all the accounts linked to the business suite, including Ladd’s personal and Iron North Studio Facebook and Instagram accounts, had been permanently deleted, with no chance to appeal the decision.

“At some point, some of this happened without my knowledge,” she said. “I didn’t do any of the appeals. I didn’t do any of the changes. This all happened from 11:05 to 11:28 (a.m.), and then I just followed the thread of emails.”

The first emotion Ladd remembers feeling was complete shock.

For small businesses like Iron North Studio, social media presence is a vital part of increasing exposure in the community. Posts picked up by the algorithm offer an easy, shareable way for the studio to expand its reach, allow customers to sign up for classes and memberships and, ultimately, bring in revenue the business relies on to pay its bills.

“To be cut off is more than just cutting off your legs — it’s just disappearing you,” she said.

While she can still reach some clients through a much smaller email list, the studio’s budget largely relies on social media-led promotions to bring in more revenue over the last three months of the year.

“If they don’t happen,” she said, “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

And it’s not for a lack of trying to get the accounts back. Over the past week, Ladd has tried every avenue possible to get support from Meta, but described the AI chatbots as running her in continuous circles.

Since she’s not able to log into her now-deleted accounts, she said, support options are much more limited. While one of the perks of paying for Meta verification is the ability to reach a human support member, this feature, she said, is also only accessible once you’re logged in.

“Once you reach the point of your account being disabled and deleted … You’re essentially in jail with no chance of parole,” she said.

It didn’t take long for Ladd to realize the chances of getting her accounts back were slim. So she started creating new accounts and rebuilding from the ground up.

And looking back on the past week since the “digital house fire,” she says it’s hard to think of anything she could have done differently. She updated her passwords regularly and she had two-factor authentication enabled. She thought that paying for Meta verification would offer her the advertised security perks.

The Ottawa Citizen reached out to Meta with questions on how it supports small businesses that relied on its platforms for outreach, but the tech company did not respond in time for publication.

And, while Ladd describes feeling betrayed and disappointed by the tech giant, she said social media marketing has become so valuable that there were no alternatives but to go back to the very same platforms the next day and start again.

“There’s no other way to do it,” she said. “That’s why it hurts and cuts so much deeper because we are shackled to it.”

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