Instagram appears to be stepping back from end-to-end encrypted messaging — a surprising move after years of Meta, its parent company, promoting strong encryption as the future of private communication.
A notice on Instagram’s help pages now says end-to-end encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after May 8, 2026. The page instructs affected users to download any chat messages or shared media they want to keep before that date.
I always laugh when I hear about meta’s end to end encryption because it isn’t remotely true in the sense that people would care about from a privacy standpoint. I know it is the case for messenger, I have not confirmed for other meta services, but in messenger the messages are encrypted in the way you would expect with the one big caveat being that meta stores your private keys on their servers. Iiirc meta explained that it is still e2e because they don’t unencrypt it which I find hilarious.
My understanding is that Whatsapp is “real” e2e and it’s based on signal protocol. That app is the main IM in many countries so they’ll probably won’t mess too much with it
I didn’t really expect Instagram or messenger to be really encrypted
bro, I swear I won’t read it bro, you can trust me bro - yo