Instagram will now allow editing of DMs for 15 minutes after they are sent
Instagram users who regret sending that poorly worded direct message can now breathe a sigh of relief.
Engineers at parent company Meta Platforms Inc. have enabled a feature allowing Instagram users to edit their DMs within a 15-minute window after hitting the send button, according to the tech behemoth.
Instagram users need to press and hold on the sent message — which will then prompt a drop-down menu with an “edit” option, according to a blog posting by Meta.
The service will also enable users to choose up to three group or one-on-one chats and “pin” them to the top of their inbox, according to Meta.
Instagram users will only need to swipe left or tap and hold on the chat. Then they can choose the “pin” option.
The company also announced it will enable Instagram users to activate a “read receipts” option that lets others know that they’ve read their message.
Meta announced the change on Tuesday — the same day that users worldwide reported outages of its online platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads.
The disruptions started at around 10 a.m. Eastern Time, with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.
Two hours later, services appeared to have been restored.
At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X, without elaborating on the issue.
Shares of Meta were up 1.5% as of 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday.
The company has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp and Threads.
Its status dashboard earlier showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.
However, the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.
Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems, which left them wondering if they were laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters.
The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the US to France.
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