Meta Discontinues Cross-App Communication Chats Between Instagram and Messenger

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has announced that it will be discontinuing its cross-platform messaging service, which allowed users to message accounts on Facebook from their Instagram account and vice versa. This feature, introduced three years ago, will be disabled by mid-December. The company has not provided a specific reason for this decision, but it coincides with Meta’s expected timeline to add support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default on Messenger by the end of the year. The change means that users will be limited to messaging individuals on the platform they are currently using, and ongoing cross-platform chats will become read-only, showing the chat history without the ability to send new messages.

The discontinuation of cross-app communication chats will impact the seamless messaging experience between Instagram and Facebook Messenger. After the change, users will no longer be able to initiate new chats with Facebook Messenger users from their Instagram account and vice versa. If users were previously engaged in cross-platform conversations, those chats will not be automatically migrated to the other platform. Additionally, features such as the Activity Status setting, which allowed Facebook users to see when someone was online or when their messages were read, will no longer be available. The move is expected to precede the introduction of end-to-end encryption on Messenger, a significant change that will enhance the privacy and security of one-to-one chats between friends and family members on the platform.