How to Stop Instagram Stories From Repeating

You may have noticed a strange — albeit frustrating — glitch with Instagram on iPhone this week: When you visited to see someone’s new story, the app also played all of their previous stories. This happened whenever they posted a new story, which meant you might have to go back and forth between the same stories several times a day to obtain the most recent information. Instagram finally has a fix after two days of jumping through repeating stories on iOS.

It’s unclear where the virus originated, and it’s also unclear how many people have been affected. All we know is that the problem appears to be limited to iPhones, as Android users’ Instagram apps have been known to recall their stories. We also know that the bug first appeared on Monday: Its Verge reported that some of its iOS workers had been affected, while users on Reddit and Twitter complained about stories repeating.

Some of us here at Lifehacker are also affected. On my own feed, They have had to sift through a lot of the same stories. They thought it was just a bug at first, but it’s been going on for two days now. Someone would comment to one of our editors’ stories in DMs, and they’d have to scroll through all of their stories if they couldn’t figure out which one the friend replied to from the thumbnail.

On Tuesday, Instagram’s parent company, Meta, announced that the problem had been identified and that a remedy was on the way. Wherever this error originated, Instagram developers appear to have uncovered and crushed it, since an update is now available to correct the issue on your end.

Unlike some other Instagram patches, the patch will only work if you install the update on your iPhone. An app like Instagram may be able to issue a server-side update, which means that the repair is applied without the end user having to do anything. However, whatever the problem with these recurring stories is, it appears that the solution must be put on each user’s iPhone.

Go to the App Store, then tap your profile in the top right to install the update on your iPhone. Pull down to reload the page, then scroll down to discover the Instagram update, which should be version 239.1 at this time (at the time of this article). The update is 196.2MB in size, but it doesn’t go into great detail about what’s been repaired. “The latest version contains bug fixes and performance improvements,” the release notes simply state.

Instagram will update on its own if you have Automatic Downloads for App Updates activated. It may, however, take some time: Automatic iOS updates sometimes take weeks, and while this doesn’t appear to be the case with applications, it’s unclear how quickly something like Instagram will update on its own. You’ll need to manually apply the update if you want your friends’ tales to stop repeating today.