All of Facebook’s services went out for nearly six hours on October 4 and a second outage was reported a few days after the first one. As a result, more than a billion users weren’t able to use Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp. It seems like the company is now working on a new feature to notify users of such outages inside the App itself so the user knows there’s some issue going on with the app. Instagram is also introducing a new tool called Account Status.
Instagram is testing a new feature that will notify you in your Activity Feed when it experiences an outage or technical issue and when it is resolved. The social media app clarifies that it won’t send a notification every time there is an outage. It will only send a notification when it sees that people are confused and looking for answers.
This test will run in the US and go on for the next few months. After that, like any experiment, Instagram may roll it out more widely, but it wants to start small for now. It may expand the feature to more users in the near future.
Instagram Account Status Tool
Instagram is also introducing a new tool called Account Status. It will be the one destination to see what’s happening with their account and content distribution. In addition, it will help people know whether their account is at risk of being disabled. In the coming months, it plans to add more information to this tool. This will give people a better sense of how their content is being distributed and recommended across different parts of Instagram.
One can also appeal to Instagram by hitting “Request a Review” directly from their Account Status if they think their content was falsely identified to be against Instagram rules.
Instagram has also been testing a ‘Favourites’ feature. The Favorites lets you categorise your most important Instagram accounts (friends and creators). After the preferred accounts have been prioritised, their posts will appear “higher” in your feed