Infuriating Instagram bug means you'll rewatch Stories endlessly

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Instagram profile with pronouns
Instagram profile with pronouns (Image credit: Luke Filipowicz / iMore)

What you need to know

  • An Instagram bug is causing the same Stories to be served over and over.
  • A Meta spokesperson says that Instagram is aware of the issue and working on fixing it.

Instagram users are currently suffering from an infuriating bug that means they can't stop watching the same Stories over and over — but at least Meta is working on it.

The issue has been reported across Twitter and Reddit over the last day or so, with people noting that they are being repeatedly shown Instagram stories that they have already seen. No matter how many times they watch them, the same Stories are served over and over and that's less than ideal. Especially if you're following some whose Stories are, shall we say, not good.

Thankfully, help might be at hand. The Verge reports that Meta is aware of the issue and that it is "working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible." People are still complaining of the issue on Twitter, though, so things definitely aren't back to normal as of the writing of this post.

Instagram Stories are short videos that are similar to what you might expect to find on TikTok and while they can be some of the best iPhone content around — if you follow the right people — variety is indeed the spice of life. Seeing the same story over and over isn't anyone's idea of fun, no matter how many times that cat falls off the sofa.

Fingers are definitely crossed that Meta and Instagram's engineers can come up with a fix for this sooner rather than later and that it doesn't require a new update to be pushed to the App Store to implement it. In the meantime, can I interest you in a look out of the window instead?

No, me neither.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.