Facebook-owned photo and video-sharing social networking platform Instagram is reportedly testing a feature to notify users of outages or technical issues directly in the app, days after two outages disrupted the social media giant’s services.
The new feature will be launched following a six-hour-long outage that happened on October 4th which prevented Facebook’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. According to reports, the test will run in the United States and will go on for a few months.
Another outage in a week was reported on October 8th when again Facebook and its apps were interrupted on which the company blamed the trouble on a configuration change at its computing platform.
The company stated that the new feature will notify users in their Activity Feed when it experiences an outage or technical issue, and when it is resolved. It also made clear that it won’t send a notification every single time there is an outage, but when people are confused and looking for answers, a notification regarding answers to doubts will be received.
The company is also planning to roll out a feature called ‘Account Status’ to address the problems faced by users on its platform, which will help to make it easier for people to know whether their account is at risk of being disabled. Account Status will be a one-stop-shop to see what’s happening with the user’s account and content distribution and whether it is going against the company’s community guidelines.
If a user believes the company has made a mistake in reading the account, they can appeal directly from their Account Status by choosing “Request a Review.”
The social media giant facing many technical issues is also grappling with former employee turned whistleblower Ms. Frances Haugen’s accusation that the company repeatedly prioritized profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
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