When she woke up in the middle of the night last Thursday, Jasmine Ault went to check her phone like she usually would.

But she didn’t expect to see a notification telling her that her Instagram and Facebook account had been permanently disabled by Meta.

It was only the start of an odyssey of frustration and anxiety spanning multiple days as Ault struggled to get to the bottom of how 20 years of personal data and professional contacts had been taken from her overnight — all while being stonewalled by AI customer service with no option to reach a human being, even after paying extra.

“It feels like I’ve lost everything in a metaphorical fire with my digital albums and my digital memories,” Ault, who lives in Toronto, told CBC News. “And who’s going to protect those if I can only speak to AI?”