Instagram (and other Facebook services) suffered an extended outage last week that lasted multiple hours and briefly caused chaos across the internet, particularly in developing countries. Today, the company announced an update coming to its mobile app, letting users know when an outage is experienced.
This test is a U.S.-only one for the most part, and Facebook isn’t making any promises that it’ll make it permanent, only that it’ll be evaluating the results and see if it makes sense to expand it in the future.
“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,” the Instagram team wrote.
As noted above, Instagram already suffered an extended outage on Monday last week, spanning around 6 hours in combination with other Facebook apps. Shortly after, Instagram later suffered a minor outage on Friday of the same week. There were reports on social media by users who claimed to have deleted their apps, turned off their Wi-Fi, even installed pending operating system updates. While not fixing the problem, a change like this would shed some light as to whether there is a problem at all.
Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp do not yet have similar features, but with userbases spanning a combined 3 billion (though with significant overlap), the company could consider rolling a similar status check feature for the other two as well. With Facebook working on merging all three services eventually, feature parity will eventually become more important than it is now.
Other than this, Instagram will also be rolling out a new Account Status page in the mobile app. If a post gets removed, you’ll see it there, along with why the post was removed. You’ll also be able to file an appeal to contest the removal, as well as see if your account is currently on a path to deletion.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.