Heading to twitter to discover that Instagram is having an outage is a thing of the past thanks to a new Insta feature.

Whether it’s FOMO or your company’s lifeline depends on it, there’s nothing more stressful than when Instagram has an outage right before you get into your favourite Reel.

Not to mention the utter chaos users experienced when both Instagram and Facebook went down twice last week.

That’s why, in an attempt to avoid recurring meltdowns, Facebook Inc is testing a new feature to notify users of outages or technical issues directly on the app.

“We’re committed to sharing more information about the nuts and bolts of Instagram, and we recently published posts on how our algorithms work and how Search works,” Instagram says.

“Today we’re announcing two new features to help give people more information about Instagram outages and their account status, directly in the app.”

The testing will occur over a few months, running only in the United States.

The new feature will notify users in their Activity Feed about when an outage has occurred and when it’s resolved.

However, only major outages will be detected or when Instagram sees its users looking for answers.

“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.”

Changes to “support request”

In addition to this new feature, Instagram is making changes to its “support request” feature.

In a new tool dubbed “account status”, users will have access to information regarding their content distribution and whether they’re at risk of having their account disabled.

If users believe they have been wrongly reported, they’ll be able to request a review directly from the feature.

The account status tool is expected to make its debut within the coming months.

Instagram will continue to update their users on the progress of both features, with an announcement on the results of their outage notification tool and account status feature to come in the next few months.

Written by Rebecca Borg