It looks like Facebook wants us to break the pattern of impulsively checking Twitter to know if any of its services are down. In light of the global outage that affected Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram last week, Instagram has developed a new built-in feature that informs users of technical issues or outages.
Instagram Feature to Notify About Outages
Once available, Instagram will show outage alerts in your Activity Feed (notification area). The feature is primarily meant to make users aware of major outages or issues. “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,” says Instagram in an official blog post.
Outage notifications are initially coming to Instagram users in the US over the coming months. The social media giant has plans to expand the feature to other regions in the near future. That’s if the test goes according to the plan, and users find it useful to stay informed of Instagram downtimes. While one would assume that Instagram has set up dedicated servers for this feature to work even if other services are down, we will know that for sure in the next outage.
Alongside this change, Instagram has revealed a new ‘Account Status’ tool. The feature acts as a dashboard to let users know if their account is at risk of getting disabled. With this tool, you can quickly view what got removed from your account and request a review. If you want to learn about other new features coming to Instagram, check out the linked article.
Furthermore, Instagram says it will add more information to this tool to give users “a better sense of how their content is being distributed and recommended across different parts of Instagram.” That’s surely something to look out for, especially if you are an Instagram creator with declining user engagement.
