American photo and video sharing social networking service, Instagram, is currently testing a new feature to let users know when they are experiencing technical difficulties.
This is believe to be the social media giant’s response to it frequent outages and most especially the recent outage which left many users of the app in the middle of nowhere.
It was gathered that the outages were so bad the app is now testing a new feature that will alert users when the service is having major technical difficulties.
The alert will appear as a notification in users’ Activity Feed when “people are confused and looking for answers.”
Founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. In April 2012, Facebook acquired the service for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock.
The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging.
Posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers. Users can browse other users’ content by tags and locations and view trending content. Users can like photos and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed.
Originally launched for iOS in October 2010, Instagram rapidly gained popularity, with one million registered users in two months, 10 million in a year, and 1 billion as of June 2018.
The Android version was released in April 2012, followed by a feature-limited desktop interface in November 2012, a Fire OS app in June 2014, and an app for Windows 10 in October 2016.