Instagram accidentally rolls out new scrolling update to surprise users

Social media platform Instagram surprised users with a sudden feed that scrolled from left to right rather than its traditional vertical format on Thursday, December 27. On a report, the company said that the update was "supposed to be a very small test but we went broader than we anticipated.”

The test led to immediate backlash on social media, but users had a quick resolution. The head of Instagram announced that the change had been meant as a small test, but a mistake caused it to roll out to a large number of users. "That was supposed to be a very small test that went broad by accident. Should be fixed now. If you're still seeing it simply restart the app. Happy holidays!" tweeted Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, shortly after the test caused a wave of backlash on Twitter.

First rolled out on Thursday, December 27, Instagram were testing a horizontal image feed instead of a vertical one on the app’s home screen.

Instead of scrolling up and down to view new posts, users could instead scroll from right to left, or can tap on the right hand side of the screen to move to the next post, like they would if they were using an Instagram story.

This meant that it was no longer possible to quickly scroll through new posts, as each individual post must be swiped or tapped to move to the next. This change only affected the main page, and user profiles worked the same way they did previously.

While users have been shocked by this update, the horizontal feed has been in the works for some time, with Instagram originally rolling it out to a select number of users in October.

Mosseri confirmed that the update should be cleared for everyone, and to just restart the app if they were still seeing it.

Given the extremely negative response that the update received from its users, Instagram may think twice before releasing the update to the public. Earlier in 2018, Snapchat released an incredibly unpopular redesign update to their app. The reaction to this change was so bad that Snap, the company that owns Snapchat, saw their stock price drop by $1.3 billion.