Christiaan Colen on Flickr/Creative Commons

Instagram changed to horizontal scrolling and people were freaking out

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Lol, jk, “just a test”

TextThom Waite

We all know that people are pretty resistant to change on the internet, so it’s no surprise that there was uproar yesterday (December 27) when Instagram briefly changed from vertical scrolling to a horizontal, Tinder-like method.

“Sorry about that,” tweeted Instagram’s head of product, Adam Mosseri, after the update went live and stayed up for around an hour before being rolled back. “This was supposed to be a very small test but we went broader than we anticipated.” In a later tweet, Mosseri again confirmed that the update was “just a test”.

Of course, an hour was more than enough time to get a significant amount of backlash for a change that extreme (because how else would we distract ourselves from the real disasters going on in the world?).

The internet reacted with some pretty accurate memes.

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And there was a lot of suspicion that Instagram actually just removed the update so fast because of the reaction of their users (although this seems pretty unlikely, given the usual hate-it-but-you’ll-get-used-to-it-in-three-weeks model).

Others used the opportunity to ask the real questions. Where’s the chronological feed gone and when are we getting it back?

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