Instagram is testing a new alert feature that will tell users when the app is down.
It follows a huge worldwide outage last week that saw all Facebook-owned apps crash for almost seven hours.
The social media network said the alert will appear as a notification in users’ Activity Feed when ‘people are confused and looking for answers’ because of an outage or technical issues.
Instagram said it would trial the feature in the US for the ‘next few months’, before potentially rolling it out more widely ‘if it makes sense to’.
Trial: Instagram is testing a new alert feature that will now tell users when the app is down
Test: The social media network said the alert will appear as a notification in users’ Activity Feed when ‘people are confused and looking for answers’ because of an outage or technical issues
The app went down for almost seven hours on October 4 after its parent company Facebook made a faulty update that disconnected its servers from the internet and brought all of its services to a halt.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger were also affected by the problem.
In a blog post announcing the new outage alert plan, Instagram said: ‘We’re testing a new feature that will notify you in your Activity Feed when we experience an outage or technical issue, and when it is resolved.
‘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.’
It added: ‘This test will run in the US and go on 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. And if it makes sense to, we’ll expand to more people.’
If the trial proves successful, it would seem likely that Facebook may also introduce a similar outage alert notification for WhatsApp, too.
In the same announcement, Instagram said it was launching a new tool called ‘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,’ the company said.
‘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.’
In the same announcement, Instagram said it was introducing a new tool called ‘Account Status’ (pictured), 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,’ the company said. Users can still appeal by hitting ‘request a review’ (pictured)
Users can still appeal if they think the social network has made a mistake by hitting ‘request a review’ from their Account Status, Instagram added.
Facebook’s seven-hour blackout last week is estimated to have cost the company around $100million in lost revenue alone.
The outage meant engineers had to travel to its Santa Clara data centre to fix the glitch in-person, but the repair was delayed because many staff are still working from home as a result of the Covid pandemic, according to one insider.
They said the glitch also brought down messaging services that remote-working staff use to communicate, so those who knew how to fix the servers couldn’t get that information to the teams inside the data centre.
The disruption was partly to blame for a nose-dive in Facebook’s share price that saw $47billion wiped from its value in its second-worst day ever on the stock market, also driven by a whistleblower testifying in Congress about the harms the site does to teenagers.
Mark Zuckerberg — who lost around $7billion amidst the carnage — has previously vowed to make work from home a permanent part of Facebook, telling staff back in June that ‘anyone whose role can be done remotely can request remote work.’