Instagram will soon alert users when the platform suffers outage

New Delhi, October 12

Battered by the six-hour long global outage earlier this month, Facebook-owned Instagram is now testing a feature that will alert users when the platform is going through major technical glitches.

The photo-messaging platform will notify users in their Activity Feed when the service experiences an outage or technical issue, and when it is resolved.

“We won’t send a notification every single time there is an outage, but when we see that people are confused and looking for answers, we’ll determine if something like this could help make things clearer,” Instagram said in a statement.

This test will initially run in the US and go on for the next few months.

“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,” the company added.

The global outage on October 4 brought millions of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger users to Twitter.

The social network later said that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

Instagram also said that it is introducing a new tool called “Account Status” that will notify users if their content is reported as inappropriate. “ “We’ll start by making it easier for people to know whether their account is at risk of being disabled,” said Instagram.

“In the coming months, we plan to add more information to this tool, giving people a better sense of how their content is being distributed and recommended across different parts of Instagram,” it added.

If you think Instagram has made a mistake, you’ll also be able to appeal by hitting “Request a Review” directly from your Account Status, the company said. — IANS