This week, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri took to Twitter to announce two new ‘finally features’ coming to Instagram. Mosseri describes a ‘finally feature’ as “one of those things that we really should have gotten to a long time ago”.
The first of these is scheduled posts. A win for the creators, scheduled posts will allow users to bulk-produce content that can be scheduled for up to 75 days in the future. These posts can also be edited and managed at any time. TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook already allow for this, but Instagram is late to the game. Still, this ‘finally feature’ will undoubtedly improve the diaries of creators and influencers, and there are many comments beneath Mosseri’s post expressing delight over this in particular.
The second announcement is a “new, redesigned website – a new Instagram.com.” Mosseri states:
“We know a lot of people use the web to multitask and we wanted to make sure Instagram is as great an experience as possible online. Cleaner, faster, easier to use and designed to take advantage of large-screen monitors.”
Mosseri then asks Twitter users to comment below. Whilst there are a lot of happy comments regarding scheduled posts, alongside others asking for scheduled stories, the majority of comments are complaining about last week’s outage that reportedly caused the suspension of millions of accounts.
The outage occurred on Monday 31st, as many users reported seeing their following drastically drop in numbers. Other users were confronted with a notification saying their account had been suspended due to a breach of community guidelines. Thousands of reports were logged at Downdetector.com and at 2:14 PM Instagram tweeted:
“We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account. We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience. #instagramdown”
Many users were able to appeal and regain access, but it’s apparent that a large amount still cannot get into their accounts. Mosseri has not replied to or commented on any of these complaints.
This arrives during a difficult week for Meta, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would cut 11,000 jobs (13% of its workforce).
Whilst Instagram appears to be trying to improve the platform for creators, the serious glitches and behind-the-scenes drama could still threaten to drive users away from the platform.
