Instagram is testing an outage notification, so you don’t whine on Twitter

A few days ago, residents of the internet flocked to Twitter to complain about Facebook’s services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, being down.

Looking at a ton of stories and people complaining about the outage, the company itself wants to inform you about outages in the future. For that, it’s testing a feature on Instagram that’ll show you information about a technical glitch or service problems in your Activity Feed.

What’s more, the company will also notify you when the issue is resolved and everything’s back to normal.

Instagram said it doesn’t want to send bother you for every time there’s an issue:

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

Currently, the company is testing this feature in the US, and might expand it globally later. Until this becomes available to everyone, there’s our handy guide to check if your favorite social network is down.

I think it’s a nifty little feature to quickly answer “Is it just me or is Instagram down for everyone?” Other apps should also follow this norm, and make the service status page more visible on their platforms.

Along with this notification, Instagram is also rolling out Account Status. It’s a new tool that informs users about reported posts and content. The hub will also inform you if you’ve violated the social network’s terms, and if your account is at the risk of being removed. You can read more about this new tool here.