One week after a large that took the entire social community’s apps offline for greater than six hours, Instagram says it’s that may alert customers to “temporary issues” like outages or different technical points.

The new alerts would seem in customers’ Activity Feed, alongside different in-app notifications. The messages might be used to let customers learn about particular points, like Story uploads not working, or a extra widespread drawback, like the 2 outages final week. Importantly, Instagram says it doesn’t plan to alert customers to each problem, however ones that could be a supply of widespread confusion.

“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,” Instagram wrote in a weblog submit. The firm added that it’s testing the function within the US “for the next few months.”

Separately, Instagram additionally confirmed off a brand new “account status” part of its app, which is supposed to alert customers to “what’s going on with your account” extra typically. Instagram says it’s beginning with notifications about posts which are eliminated and when an account “is at risk of being disabled” as a result of rule violations.

According to Instagram, the function is supposed to make it simpler for customers to grasp why a submit could have been eliminated, and whether or not or not they could be at risk of shedding an account altogether. While the app has notified customers up to now when a submit is labeled or eliminated, the corporate hasn’t all the time carried out an excellent job letting individuals know which coverage they violated. The Oversight Board has Facebook it must do a greater job at explaining guidelines to customers, and account standing might assist them do exactly that.

Account standing might additionally assist the app tackle a extra Instagram-specific problem: considerations over Instagram says that “in the coming months” it plans to replace account standing to let individuals know “how their content is being distributed and recommended across different parts of Instagram.”