Instagram appears to be stepping back from end-to-end encrypted messaging — a surprising move after years of Meta, its parent company, promoting strong encryption as the future of private communication.
A notice on Instagram’s help pages now says end-to-end encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after May 8, 2026. The page instructs affected users to download any chat messages or shared media they want to keep before that date.
My guess is that they implemented e2ee (or at least they claimed to do it) so people wouldn’t be as likely to switch to actually secure messaging platforms. “See here, pleb, our systems are very secure too. You don’t want to switch to Signal, and your friends are all here anyhow”.
Now they just don’t give a shit anymore.