Just this week, Facebook’s long-planned integration of the Instagram’s Direct Messaging and the Messenger service started to be rolled out. But it seems like there’s been problems on the services’ back-ends while they were undertaking the transition.
Yesterday, people reported being unable to use Instagram’s Direct Messages or the app for hours.
And now, some Instagram users say their messages are disappearing.
“Never should’ve updated Instagram. They deleting messages outta my inbox,” one user tweeted.
Former tech writer and now VC Josh Constine drew attention to the problem on Twitter, pointing out that dozens of users were tweeting about having the same issue.
“This sucks. Instagram is mistakenly deleting people’s messages as it connects Direct to Facebook Messenger,” he tweeted. “People’s romances, friendships, & favorite memes live in those threads.”
This sucks. Instagram is mistakenly deleting people’s messages as it connects Direct to Facebook Messenger.
People’s romances, friendships, & favorite memes live in those threads.
Hopefully CEO @mosseri can fix this or reporters like @TaylorLorenz & @sarahfrier can warn people pic.twitter.com/JHaTWsqlSz
— Josh Constine -SignalFire (@JoshConstine) October 22, 2020
Not long after, Facebook’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, confirmed the issue on Twitter. He said, thankfully, that messages weren’t lost all together.
“I just got confirmation that no messages have been deleted, and our engineers are working on restoring them as quickly as they can,” he tweeted.
As you might recall, the company promised that bringing the services together would improve the service for their users. The announcement of the cross-messaging feature also announced new Instagram messages features and improvements for user privacy through end-to-end encryption.
What the company didn’t outright say but has publicly hinted at is how the combination of the services helps the company itself.
By uniting the backend, it makes it harder to untangle the company’s products if, say, there was an on-going investigation about how Facebook and other tech companies were too big and anti-competitive. (Oh yeah, there is.)
And if some messages disappear in the quest to stay united, Zuckerberg will likely be okay with that. Let’s hope those messages reappear sooner rather than later.