Meta faces a UK fine of up to 10% of revenue over Instagram’s vanishing Instants

Britain’s online safety regulator wants to know whether Meta weighed the dangers of Instagram Instants before switching it on. Instants lets you snap a photo inside the app and send it to close friends or mutual followers, who can look at it once before it disappears. If Ofcom finds that Meta skipped or botched the risk assessments the law requires, the company faces a fine that can reach a tenth of its worldwide revenue.

For anyone who uses Instants, the case goes to the core of how disappearing photos work. A picture that vanishes after one view feels casual and low-pressure among friends. It also leaves nothing behind for a parent, a moderator or the police to find later. The Online Safety Act requires platforms to weigh that trade-off on paper before a significant launch, and Ofcom is checking whether Meta did so for illegal content and for the risks to children.

Instants behaves more like BeReal or Snapchat than like the Instagram feed. Photos have to be taken in the moment with a single tap, camera-roll uploads are blocked, and the only edit allowed is a line of text. Each photo stays available for 24 hours, and senders can keep a private archive of their own shots for up to a year. The feature sits inside Instagram’s direct messages and also comes as a separate app, which Meta first tested in Spain and Italy.

Meta says the safeguards were there from day one. According to the company, recipients cannot screenshot, reshare or forward an Instant, there is no public feed, and teen accounts get their protections automatically, including parental supervision tools. “We conducted a risk analysis and briefed Ofcom about this feature on a number of occasions before launching it,” a Meta spokesperson said, adding that the company will cooperate with the investigation.

Ofcom frames its case around process as much as product. “Our online safety laws are clear – significant changes to platforms must be risk assessed before they’re launched,” said George Lusty, Ofcom’s director of enforcement. “Safety by design must be built in, not bolted on.”

The probe has clear limits. Opening an investigation does not establish that Meta broke the law, and Ofcom’s question is a narrow one: whether a suitable and sufficient assessment existed before launch, not whether Instants is harmful in itself. Screenshot blocking also has an obvious gap, because nothing stops a recipient from photographing the screen with a second phone. The case covers the UK only and has no direct effect on how Instants works in other countries.

The regulator has been building a record. Since October 2025, Ofcom has issued more than £7 million in fines against 11 providers under the Online Safety Act, including £520,000 against 4chan over child protection failures. The Molly Rose Foundation, the charity set up by the family of Molly Russell, has called for Meta to be held accountable.

Ofcom announced the investigation on October 6, five months after Instants reached Instagram in May, and has set no deadline. If it finds a breach, it can order Meta to take remedial action and impose a fine of up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. The photos vanish after one view. The paperwork Meta says it prepared before launch is what Ofcom now wants to read.

Tags: meta, privacy, social media, instagram, Instagram Instants, Ofcom