Helping you understand what’s going on with your account

We’re committed to sharing more information about the nuts and bolts of Instagram, and we recently published posts on how our algorithms work and how Search works. We’re announcing two new features to help give people more information about Instagram outages and their account status, directly in the app.

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.

We’re testing a new feature that will notify you in your Activity Feed when we experience 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. This test will run in the US and go on for the next few months. Just like any experiment, this may be something we roll out more widely, but we want to start small and learn. And if it makes sense to, we’ll expand to more people.

Last year we introduced Support Requests to give people more information about anything they previously reported on Instagram – posts, comments, profiles – and to let people know if anything they posted went against our Community Guidelines.

We’re making changes to make it even easier to know what’s going on with your account, in a new tool called “Account Status”. Account Status will be your one-stop shop to see what’s happening with your account and content distribution.

We’ll start by making it easier for people to know whether their account is at risk of being disabled. 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.

If you think we’ve made a mistake, you’ll also be able to appeal by hitting “Request a Review” directly from your Account Status.

We’ll be sharing more about both these features over time, so make sure to look out for updates.