Just last week, roughly 3.5 billion people couldn’t access Instagram and were left confused by the length outage. To ease users through future issues, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app is testing out a new feature that will alert users of outages or technical difficulties directly in the app.
However, the platform won’t bombard you with notifications in case of a minor outage. Instagram aims to limit these notifications to times when a large number of users are attempting to check if the app is down, such as when tech publications start writing about the outage (hi!) or when it begins to trend on Twitter.
It’s worth noting that the feature won’t be here anytime soon. The feature-testing will take place in the United States 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,” reads Instagram’s blog post. “And if it makes sense to, we’ll expand to more people.”
Instagram is also introducing a new tool called ‘Account Status,’ which serves as a “one-stop-shop” to view what’s going on with your account and content distribution.
The new tool will initially only show if your account is in danger of being disabled because you’ve violated any of Instagram’s guidelines. In the coming months, the feature will be expanded to give “people a better sense of how their content is being distributed and recommended across different parts of Instagram.”
Users can also submit an appeal from the Account Status page by clicking “Request a Review” in case you’ve been falsely incriminated.
Image credit: Instagram
Source: Instagram
