Over the years, Meta-owned apps have faced their fair share of backlash over concerns regarding their shady privacy practices. Instagram has certainly not been exempt from this. Now, the company is working on making your Instagram Direct Messages more secure, but it comes at a cost.

Instagram’s Enhanced Security Comes at a Cost

A few hours ago, I noticed a banner had appeared in Instagram’s Direct Messages section. As shown in the image below, it mentions that “some messages may be unavailable after June 23, 2025.”

If you’re anything like me and have memories attached to everything, including your messages, this notification might (understandably) freak you out. Fortunately, there’s not much to worry about. Upon clicking the Learn More button, you’ll be redirected to an Instagram Support page, where it mentions the following:

Instagram is upgrading security and some older end-to-end encrypted chats may be unavailable after June 23, 2025.

End-to-end encryption is a security feature that protects your data by ensuring that only you and the sender can read your messages. Ultimately, this means that not even Meta can read your messages.

End-to-end encryption in Instagram DMs isn’t enabled by default though. On iOS and Android devices, you can start an end-to-end encrypted chat by heading to your Direct Messages, opening a new or existing conversation thread, and then tapping the recipient’s name at the very top of the message. Finally, select Privacy & Safety and tap Use end-to-end encryption.

Personally, I find the fact that Instagram is removing some old end-to-end encrypted chats odd, especially since Meta is so vague about its reasoning in the Support article.

Though the company enhancing security is certainly a move in the right direction, I wouldn’t have expected them to wipe certain chats away, no matter how old they might be.

Save Your Affected Instagram Chats Before It’s Too Late

The good news is that if you have conversations that are impacted by this change, Instagram states that you can save any media or messages from them that you’d like to keep until the cutoff date.

You’ll notice a View Chats button in the banner notifying you of the change, and tapping it will take you to a page showing all your end-to-end encrypted chats that’ll be unavailable after June 23, 2025. None of my chats are affected by this change, which means no chats appeared on this page for me.

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Instagram’s support article mentions that “there will be information in the chat on how you can download any media or messages you may want to keep.” So, simply follow the on-screen instructions to export your chat, and you should be all set.

When I saw this notification initially, I thought it was similar to the Instagram technical bug last year that affected some images and videos saved in the Stories Archive section, which ended up permanently deleting them. Though Instagram ended up addressing the bug, the lost Stories could never be restored. It was a huge bummer for me, since I used Instagram’s Archives as a way to preserve my memories.

Regardless, at least Instagram is giving you a heads-up this time around and a chance to save your memories.