An Instagram bug briefly hid likes from some of its users on Tuesday, after the company accidentally expanded a long-running test of the feature. The company has been testing removing likes for years, and accidentally released the test to the public, which caused quite the uproar, as we initially reported.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced in 2019 at Wired25 that the platform would begin hiding "like" counts on posts within a week. "We will make decisions that hurt the business if they help people's well-being and health," Mosseri said at the time.
Since then, IG has been testing the removal of Likes across different users in different areas. However, apparently yesterday, it went wide to many more people than intended.
An official IG Comms account released a statement saying, "We've been testing a new experience to hide likes on Feed posts. We unintentionally added more people to the test today, which was a bug — we’re fixing this issue and restoring like counts to those people as soon as possible."
This was followed up by the one and only Instagram account, apologetically saying, "So Instagram ...did not mean to hide likes for everyone."
Nonetheless, once Instagram users realized that their Likes were hidden, even temporarily, the memes came in.
[via]