As of late, Facebook has been under pressure to improve their handling of consumer data after it was revealed that the information of almost 50 million users had ended up wrongly in the hands of Manhattan political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Such news has caused a suppression within Instagram‘s way of operating. It was reported that over the weekend the photo-sharing app had limited third-party applications access to user information by as much as 96 percent. Applications that helped Instagram gather and analyze data about their followers could before pull updated data from Instagram’s application program interface 5,000 times per hour were now slashed to 200 times per hour.
Some applications have even had their access removed altogether.
The sudden change has caused bugs and issues to begin to arise in third-party Instagram applications, leading some to believe that they may be soon obsolete. Confirmation from Instagram that they will no longer be accepting new app submissions to their API doesn’t help either.
Not much more information has been disclosed currently as Instagram themselves have not gone public with the news as of yet.