Meta claimed for years that it was technically challenging to implement end-to-end encryption across Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs, but back in 2023 said that it had resolved those issues.
Unfortunately, the company has now made a U-turn on Instagram direct messages, and that’s bad news for all of us …
A quick recap
Meta had been working on making end-to-end encryption (E2EE) standard for Facebook Messenger since 2019. The company said at the time that this was a non-trivial task.
It quickly became apparent that transitioning our services to E2EE would be an incredibly complex and challenging engineering puzzle. We would have to rewrite almost the entire messaging and calling code base from scratch.
