Instagram seems to be recovering after a total blackout in a global scale. For the last several hours,
people all around the world expressed their concerns on Twitter, making all sorts of jokes on how
Twitter is the last stronghold, or how their lives are over since Instagram can’t refresh. Reports came
from the U.S., Australia and several European countries.
It is worth noting that there are millions of people who make a living out of promoting or advertising
products and services on the world-known photo-sharing platform. Those so called ‘influencers’
would be the ones in most difficult position, should the platform deal with an extended blackout.
Thankfully we won’t have to find out where that road would take us, since the issue seems to be
getting resolved, slowly but steadily. Comments and posts coming from Texas and Genovia, show
that things are getting back on track. Surprisingly, Instagram’s official blog hasn’t made any
comments on the outage. They do however advice users who are experiencing difficulties to follow
standard technical resolution steps, such as restarting their devices, signing out and back into their
accounts, deleting and re-downloading the app, etc.
While the technical difficulties of the outage are being dealt with, one at a time, we have a feeling
that Instagram will never be the same again. Not in terms of appearance or performance necessarily;
at least not at the beginning. But the future of the world’s biggest photo sharing platform and the
way it’s being operated, could soon be subject to change. That is because the co-founders are
leaving the company. Rumour has it that their resignation came after growing tensions between
them and Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to be meddling with the decisions concerning the direction
of Instagram.
“We’re planning on leaving Instagram to explore our curiosity and creativity again. Building new
things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world
needs; that’s what we plan to do”, said the duo in an Instagram’s press statement. “We remain
excited for the future of Instagram and Facebook in the coming years as we transition from leaders
to two users in a billion. We look forward to watching what these innovative and extraordinary
companies do next.”
Having started their platform as entrepreneurs Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger got to 13 million
members before their company was acquired by Facebook for $715 million. Today, six years later,
Instagram has over a billion of registered users, while according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis
it’s worth more than $100 billion.
Systrom and Krieger definitely used as best as they could the resources of their parent-company.
From offices and funds to new minds and programming hands that they welcomed on board, the
two entrepreneurs optimized what was given to them in order to elevate their project to new
heights. Still, they were always in position to maintain all creative and directive control of their
company. Sometimes that meant refusing to accept Zuckerberg’s suggestions or empathize with his
visions.
But as recent studies have shown, Facebook print on the world seems to be fading, giving its place to
other social networks such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. In fact, Facebook has over 2.2
billion registered users which practically means that there will soon be no more users to attract and
ad rates will inevitably start going down at some point. Instagram on the other hand has still a long
way to go and all predictions point to an upwards direction.
In any case, the platform’s future will remain uncertain for the coming months, or until a new
captain is established on the wheel. According to the latest news, this position now belongs to Adam
Mosseri, who ran Facebook’s News Feed for years before joining Instagram as its VP of product
earlier in 2018. Since we haven’t seen Mosseri in any other leading roles before, it’s hard to tell
whether he’ll adopt the same attitude against Zuckerberg’s day-to-day involvement, or whether
we’ll see Instagram becoming more of an integrated feature of Facebook rather than an
independent product.
Source:
https://www.recode.net/2018/10/1/17924592/instagram-new-ceo-adam-mosseri-kevin-strom-
replacement
https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/09/24/statement-from-kevin-systrom-instagram-co-
founder-and-ceo/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-25/instagram-founders-depart-facebook-after-
clashes-with-zuckerberg
