Instagram is testing a tool that will notify the users when the platform is not working as it should. The news comes only days after the social media app suffered a global outage which saw parent company, Facebook lose revenues of roughly sh.10 billion.
When Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram fail, people often wonder if there’s something wrong with their connection, their internet, or their account.
A little notification telling users, “Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s us” will probably save a lot of confusion in the future.
The new tool would enable in-app notifications and new alerts that would appear in the Activity Feed on Instagram.
As mentioned in a report by Engadget, the message could be delivered about specific issues explaining what it is and approximate time on when it can get resolved from the back end.
Firstly, the test will start with users in the US before a global rollout of the new feature. It’s likely that this same feature may be rolled out on other Zuckerberg-owned apps including Facebook and WhatsApp.
In the same announcement today, Instagram also said it was introducing a new tool named “Account Status” which 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 the company in a blog post.
“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.”