Instagram has announced that it is testing two new features to help give people more information about Instagram outages and their account status, directly in the app.

This feature comes only days after the social media giant’s services were disrupted by two outages.

Instagram in a blog post said the test will run in the United States and will go on for a few months,

How the feature will work

The new feature will notify users in their Activity Feed when Instagram experiences 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.

“Through conversations with our community and extensive research, 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,” Instagram said.

The company also intends to launch a feature that would make it easier for users to see whether their account is at risk of being deactivated.

“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,” the company added.

What you should know

WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram experienced a six-hour long outage on October 4 that prevented many users from accessing its services.

The massive outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.

The outage was the company’s longest since a bug knocked the service offline for over a day in 2008, affecting roughly 80 million users.