Instagram Stories giving you unwanted deja vu? Here’s how to fix that
A glitch that reportedly came with the mobile app’s recent update forced users to re-watch Stories they had previously seen. Not to worry though, there's an easy solution to this issue.
Social media apps including Instagram on a mobile phone. (Photo: iStock)
If you found yourself in a time loop-esque situation while using Instagram recently, you're not alone.
Since Tuesday (Jun 14), users have reported experiencing a glitch that forces them to have to re-watch someone's past Stories whenever that person post a new one.
Normally, once you've already seen someone’s older Stories, that person would only reappear on your feed if they posted something new. Say you already skipped past your friend's series of mirror selfies earlier in the day. When he pops back up on your feed later that evening, you should only see his newer Stories of his dinner date.
However, with the glitch, if you opened his Stories, you would have to sit through all the mirror selfies, and then watch his newer posts.
Users took to social media to air their frustrations, or in true Internet fashion, crack jokes about it, with references to the movie Groundhog Day in which the characters were stuck in a time loop. Some users called it charity work to stop posting new Stories while the glitch was active.
According to Digital Trends, the glitch came with a recent update for the app, causing it to forget where users stopped watching their friends’ Stories. As a result, it forced them to start again from the earliest available story every time new content was put up.
In the update in question, Instagram’s parent company Meta introduced new parental control features to regulate younger users’ time spent on the app. However, it’s not clear whether these had anything to do with the glitch.
That said, this problem does have a few simple solutions. Some users were able to resolve the glitch by deleting and reinstalling the app on their mobile devices, although this wasn’t guaranteed to work for everyone.
For others, Instagram rolled out an update that has been available on app stores on Jun 15, saying that “the latest version contains bug fixes and performance improvements”.
Stay funky, Instagram, but not too funky.
