Instagram will now notify users if there is a service outage

Instagram is running this new test in the U.S. for the next few months and will expand it to more users if it makes sense to do so.

After suffering consecutive outages in a week, Instagram is working on a new tool that will notify users if the app is down for any reason. The company announced the feature in a blog post on Monday. "We know how confusing it can be when temporary issues happen on Instagram. When they impact engagement or distribution, we also know that it can lead people to think that the problems are unique to them, based on what they post. That lack of clarity can be frustrating, which is why we want it to be easier to understand what's going on directly from us," says the blog post.

As per the blog announcement, Instagram will notify users in their Activity Feeds when the company is experiencing an outage or technical issues and again when they're fixed. However, it won't issue notifications repeatedly. It will consider sending one when people are confused and looking for answers.

Instagram is running this new test in the U.S. for the next few months, as it wants to start small with the feature and then expand it to more users if it makes sense to do so. This comes after the incident last week when Facebook's suite of apps which includes Instagram and WhatsApp, went down for more than five hours last Monday in a worldwide outage. Again on Friday, the apps suffered a two hours outage due to faulty configuration change.