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Instagram testing in-app outage and account status notifications

It has been a week since Facebook and its associated services like Instagram and WhatsApp suffered a massive global outage. While normal service has resumed across the board, the fallout from the outage is yet to be quantified.

In order to better handle such situations in the future, Instagram has announced that it is testing a few new features. This is outside of the recent plan to better handle harmful content, as the social media platform is testing in-app notifications for service outages and account statuses.

“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,” wrote the platform in a blog post.

“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,” it adds.

While it remains to be seen whether such a feature will stop any exoduses from the platform, akin to the ones WhatsApp suffered during and after the outage, it is clear that Instagram wants to keep communications as visible as possible in order to retain user loyalty.

As for the account status test, it appears to be more directed at content creators, many of whom are dependent on services like Instagram being operational in order to generate an income.

“Account Status will be your one-stop shop to see what’s happening with your account and content distribution,” the blog post notes.

“We’ll start by making it easier for people to know whether their account is at risk of being disabled. 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,” it continues.

It is unclear when these new features will move out of the test phase, but Instagram says it will share an announcement when they do.

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