What does “Was Live” mean on Instagram?

Alice Sjöberg
Instagram page open on phone

Thousands of Instagram users received a notification from the app recently that said “Was Live”, but what does it mean? Here’s everything you need to know.

It’s been 12.5 years since the social media platform Instagram was first put live. The platform currently have over 2.35 billion active users as of 2023 and was the second most downloaded app in 2022 after TikTok with over 548 million downloads.

To keep users interested in the app, developers are constantly thinking of ways to make the users want to stay on the platform. One of these things was the “Was Live” feature which unfortunately left many users in a panic when it was introduced earlier in May.

What does the “Was Live” message on Instagram mean?

The “Was Live” message usually appears under ones profile when they’ve recently done a livestream on Instagram. It also appears under their name when looking on their Instagram Story.

During the first week of May 2023, thousands of Instagram users got a notification on the story part of their app saying they’d been live.

When scrolling through the Story bubbles from their friends, a message saying “Was Live” appears below everyone’s usernames, making people wonder if they’d been live on the app by mistake.

As users went manic wondering if they’d somehow done a livestream on the platform without realising, it was soon discovered that it was a glitch. However, this now seem to have been fixed, and hopefully the new feature will be available again without any further problems.

Users don’t like the feature

Despite having the glitch fixed, Instagram users do not seem convinced about the new feature as many took to Twitter to complain.

One person wrote: “What is this new glitch of Instagram which shows “was live” next to every profile.”

A second user said: “Why does Instagram say I was live when I was in fact not?”

“What the hell is ‘was live’ on instagram!?? What is that I don’t understand, thats so weird,” a third user wrote.

If there’s anything else you want to know about Instagram, you can read our coverage here.

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About The Author

Alice is an Entertainment Writer at Dexerto, whose expertise include social media, internet culture, and Reality TV. She is a NCTJ qualified journalist that previously worked in local news before moving on to entertainment news with OK! Magazine and a wide variety of other publications. You can contact Alice at alice.sjoberg@dexerto.com