How to Stop Instagram From Repeating Stories
This week, you may have noticed a curious, if frustrating, problem with Instagram on iPhone: when you went to view someone’s new stories, the app also played back all of their old stories. This happened every time they uploaded a new story, which meant you might have to skip the same stories multiple times a day to get the latest updates. After two days of jumping through recurring stories on iOS, Instagram has finally found a solution.
It’s unclear where this bug came from, and it’s not obvious how many users were affected. All we know is that the problem seems to be related to the iPhone as Instagram apps for Android users remember their stories. We also know that the bug seems to have started around Monday, with The Verge reporting that some of its iOS employees encountered the bug, while users on Reddit and Twitter also complained about duplicate stories.
Some of us at Lifehacker have also been affected. I had to listen to a lot of recurring stories in my own feed. At first I thought it was some weird glitch, but apparently it’s been happening for two days now. One of our editors also had a problem in private messages: someone replied to one of his stories, and they had to look through all their stories if they could not figure out from the thumbnail which one the friend replied to.
Instagram’s parent company, Meta, confirmed on Tuesday that the company is aware of the issue and that the solution will be fixed. Wherever this bug originated, the Instagram developers seem to have found it and fixed it, as an update is now available that may fix some issues on your end.
Unlike some Instagram patches, you need to install an update on your iPhone for the patch to take effect. Sometimes an app like Instagram might release a server side update which means a fix is implemented without the end user doing anything at all. However, it seems that whatever the problem with these recurring stories is, the fix needs to be installed on every user’s iPhone.
To install the update on your iPhone, go to the App Store, then tap your profile in the top right corner. Pull the page down to refresh it, then scroll down to find the Instagram update, which should be version 239.1 (at the time of this writing). The update is 196.2MB in size, but doesn’t include details on what exactly is fixed. Rather, the release notes simply say, “The latest version contains bug fixes and performance improvements.”
If you have auto-download turned on for app updates, Instagram will update itself. However, this can take a while: automatic iOS updates can sometimes take weeks , and while this isn’t necessarily the case for apps, it’s not clear how quickly something like Instagram will update on its own. If you want your friends’ stories to stop repeating themselves today, you’ll need to install the update manually.
[ 9to5Mac ]