In September 2020, Meta rolled out cross-app messaging between Facebook and Instagram, allowing two people to communicate regardless of their preferred app.
A little over three years later, the feature is being shuttered
Instagram and Facebook’s support documents were recently updated to reveal that the service will no longer be available from mid-December onwards. Once the feature is shut down, Instagram users won’t be able to start new conversations with Facebook accounts, and vice versa.
All existing chats with users on the other platform will become read-only.
Users on the other platform also won’t be able to see your active status and whether you’ve opened their old message or not.
The feature could have been a great Meta-exclusive, and who knows, WhatsApp might have been the next platform to be integrated. However, that would have made the Meta-owned companies even more tightly knit together, and a potential split between the companies would be hard to manage.
It is also likely that the feature wasn’t really being utilized as much as Meta had envisioned, and shutting it down might allow the company to use those resources elsewhere.
In other Meta-related news, the company has partnered with IBM to create a responsible AI alliances, roughly two months after scrapping its own responsible AI team.
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