My Experience with Instagram Stories' Latest Glitch

I was convinced that my phone was going through one of its theatric 2-3 days ago. I had recently created a fast sequence of my dog videos, hit the Share to Story button and waited until the rainbow ring showed up. The story thumbnail instead remained obstinately grey, and disappeared completely out of the top bar. A few seconds later friends started texting: I did not see anything on your profile-did you delete it? It was not only them, but the story did not appear on the home screen of anyone. It existed in the abyss of the drafts, half-uploaded, and was not visible to anyone except me. 

The stranger it became the more I investigated. By the time I managed to get the clips online, the counter of views had frozen at zero, with the notifications of the hearts still coming in. I opened the list of viewers and I found a few names with the label of being hidden, although I never blocked them. Clicking a name would momentarily de-grey it but the subsequent refresh restored it to limbo. In some cases, some stories even vanished, only to resurface when a person liked it, as though Instagram was not sure whether that post was there in the first place. 

Watching Stories of other people was not any smoother either. The initial slide would open and then the app would freeze and pay no attention to taps. There was one strange trick that worked: I tapped the message-reply bar, closed it, and went back to the Story, and that unlocked the carousel and allowed me to swipe forward. A small UI diversion, but it always thawed the player out more than killing the app or clearing the cache. At last, I made a decision to watch the stories in the glitch time using insmask to have a bette experience.

Of course I went through the usual process of troubleshooting, switching between Wi-Fi and data, force quitting, clearing cache, updating to latest build, even re-installing the whole app. Nothing was really effective. Every patch was akin to a duct-taped pool toy: it floated a few minutes before another symptom appeared. What all the glitches had in common was that they all were stories: the uploads were not working, the viewer metrics were not being reported correctly, or the interactions were not being counted in real time.

I believe the guilty party is a server-side change that Meta has deployed late last week, most likely associated with whatever new functionality it is secretly A/B-testing. Since the hiccups manifest not only on Android and iOS, not only on different accounts, but even on different continents, my cousin in Berlin also saw the same greyed-out thumbnails and ghost likes, this does not seem to be a corrupt cache or a poor connection. It is the platform itself that is shaking on the hood.

I believe the offender is a server-side change that Meta rolled out late last week, likely in connection to whatever new functionality the company is currently A/B-testing. Since the hiccups manifest on Android and iOS, on different accounts and, in my case, even on different continents (my cousin in Berlin also saw the same greyed-out thumbnails and ghost likes), it seems more than a corrupted cache or a poor connection. It is the platform that is actually on the shaky footing under the hood.

But what can be done, at least, until an appropriate patch is released?

• Keep informed. New builds should follow a hotfix by a day or two, so leave auto-updates enabled.
• The message-bar detour works when Stories freeze in the middle of viewing; it is clunky, but it works.
• Save long videos and post them; smaller files appear to be less likely to end up in the upload limbo.
• Report the bug within the app, every time it occurs. The logs of Instagram should have volume in order to prioritise a fix.

Until Meta plugs the leaks we will keep refreshing, troubleshooting and commiserating but at least we will have a few good tales to tell of the stories that have gone rogue.