After suffering two outages in a week, Instagram is testing a feature that lets you know when it's having issues so you won't think it's just your internet
- Instagram says it is testing a feature that notifies users when outages or technical issues occur.
- The company will use the feature "when we see that people are confused and looking for answers."
Instagram is testing out a new feature to notify users about outages after the app suffered two of them in the span of five days last week.
The company announced the feature in a blog post on Monday.
"We know how confusing it can be when temporary issues happen on Instagram," the post reads. "When they impact engagement or distribution, we also know that it can lead people to think that the problems are unique to them, based on what they post. That lack of clarity can be frustrating, which is why we want it to be easier to understand what's going on, directly from us."
Instagram says the feature will notify users in their Activity Feeds when the company is experiencing outages or technical issues - and again when they're fixed.
The company says it won't issue notifications every time an outage occurs, but it'll consider sending one "when we see that people are confused and looking for answers."
For now, the feature will be available in the US for the next few months.
Facebook's suite of apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, were down for more than five hours last Monday in an outage spanning multiple countries. In a blog post later that day, Facebook said the outage was caused by a "faulty configuration change" and that it had no evidence that any user data was compromised during the disruption.
In a post on his Facebook page, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg also apologized for the outage, saying, "Sorry for the disruption today -- I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about."
On Friday, Facebook's apps were hit with a second outage, which lasted roughly two hours. Facebook says this outage wasn't related to the first one that had taken place earlier that week.