By Sammie Jones-
Over 6,000 Instagram users have reported problems with the app after being unable to use the social media platform on Thursday afternoon.
Downdetector, which collates reports of outages from multiple sources, including Twitter and reports submitted on its websites and mobile apps shows that Instagram outage reports started to rise substantially just after 8am BST, reaching a peak after noon.
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Instagram users expressed their frustrations on twitter, which was still functioning normally.
The reason for the outage is still unknown, but complaints included the fact that the news feed would not refresh, direct messages would not send, or comments could not be posted – as well as not being able to get into the app at all. UK, France, US and Portugal are the most affected countries at the moment.
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Instagram said: “We’ll start to ask you for your birthday when you open Instagram. We’ll show you a notification a handful of times and if you haven’t provided us with your birthday by a certain point, you’ll need to share it to continue using Instagram.”
And don’t think for one minute that you’ll get away with pretending that you’re older or younger than you really are. It seems Instagram will be keeping a careful eye on you.
“We recognise some people may give us the wrong birthday, and we’re developing new systems to address this”, the firm added. “We’re using artificial intelligence to estimate how old people are based on things like ‘Happy Birthday’ posts. In the future, if someone tells us they’re above a certain age, and our technology tells us otherwise, we’ll show them a menu of options to verify their age.”
Well, these big new changes are being put in place to help keep its younger audience safe when using the app. Instagram says that this information will allow it to create new safety features for young people, and help ensure it provides the right experiences to the right age group.
If you started using Instagram within the last year, you’ll have already handed over your date of birth during the account set-up process. The latest change – and tough new measures for those who don’t comply – is designed to get those with older accounts to update their profile with their date of birth.
“We’ve been clear that we want to do more to create safer, more private experiences for young people,” Instagram explained. “To do that we need to know how old everybody is on Instagram, so we’ve started asking people to share their birthday with us if they haven’t shared it previously.”