Instagram is going to start testing outage alerts to inform users about when technical issues occur and when they are resolved. This was announced in a blog post detailing the changes Instagram is making in order to help users understand what’s going on with their account.
The in-app alerts will be shown in the Activity Feed and will occur when Instagram sees that people are looking for answers. There won’t be notifications for every single outage, but the ultimate goal is just to resolve any mass confusion on the app. The experiment will only be for US users and will be happening for the next few months.
This feature is probably being added because of the two Facebook outages that affected Instagram and WhatsApp as well. The first outage lasted about six hours and the other lasted about two, indirectly causing Mark Zuckerberg to lose USD 6 billion in a couple hours.
In the recent events, Facebook had to turn to their competitor, Twitter, to inform its users of the outages and to ensure that they are working to fix the problem. Having to rely on a competitor’s service is seriously not a good look, so it makes sense that Instagram is making their own solution to the problem.
In their blog post, Instagram also announced that it will be testing out an “Account Status” page. With this tool, users can see all the details about what’s happening with their account as well as content distribution. For example, if your content has been flagged because of community guidelines, you can view why the content has been removed and even “Request a Review’ if you think they made a mistake.
Once again, these features will only be rolled out to some users in the US for now. Instagram said in the post, “Just like any experiment, this may be something we roll out more widely, but we want to start small and learn. And if it makes sense to, we’ll expand to more people.”
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