50 free Instagram trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Instagram trivia quiz tells the app's story in questions: the check-in app called Burbn that pivoted to photos, the first post at Pier 38, the square 640-pixel frame, the $1 billion sale to Facebook in 2012, and the milestones on the way to a billion users. It then works through the features everyone uses without thinking: hashtags and Explore, the Lux filter, 15-second video, Direct messages, Stories and their 24-hour clock, Boomerang and Hyperlapse, IGTV's rise and fall, Reels and its TikTok rivalry, and the algorithm changes, outages, fines and redesigns that made headlines. The early questions are easy for anyone who has posted a photo; the later ones reward people who remember when the feed was chronological. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Instagram is owned by which company?
Meta
The same parent runs Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads.
Q 02In which year did Instagram launch on iOS?
2010
The app hit the App Store on October 6 and had a million registered users within two months.
Q 03Kevin Systrom co-founded Instagram with which Brazilian software engineer?
Mike Krieger
The two announced they were stepping down from the company in September 2018.
Q 04What was the name of the mobile check-in app that became Instagram?
Burbn
Its founders noticed that photo-sharing was the feature users actually loved, and refocused on that.
Q 05The founders pivoted because their check-in app was too similar to which rival?
Foursquare
Ironically, Instagram then used the rival's API for location tagging until switching away in 2014.
Q 06'Instagram' is a portmanteau of 'instant camera' and which word?
Telegram
Third-party apps were later banned from using 'insta' or 'gram' in their own names.
Q 07The very first Instagram post was a photo of what?
South Beach Harbor
It was taken at Pier 38 and posted at 5:26 p.m. on July 16, 2010, months before the public launch.
Q 08Which company bought Instagram in April 2012?
The deal closed that September for $300 million in cash plus 23 million shares.
Q 09Roughly how much did Instagram sell for in 2012?
$1bn
At the time the price was compared with the $35 million Yahoo had paid for Flickr in 2005.
Q 10Early Instagram photos were locked to a square of how many pixels, matching the iPhone's width?
640
The limit rose to 1080 pixels in 2015, the same year portrait and widescreen shapes were allowed.
Q 11An Instagram Story stays visible to others for how many hours?
24
Story Highlights, added in December 2017, are the version that never expires.
Q 12As of January 2019, how many million people used Stories every day?
500
The feature had only launched in August 2016.
Q 13In which year did Instagram reach one billion registered users?
2018
It had taken two months to reach the first million and a year to reach ten million.
Q 14The Android app launched in April 2012 and was downloaded over how many million times in a day?
Q 21Reels, introduced in August 2020, was built to compete with which app?
TikTok
Engagement still lagged well behind its rival as of 2022 despite heavy creator spending.
Q 22Reels was first rolled out in November 2019 in which country?
Brazil
It then expanded to France and Germany before the global launch in 50 countries in August 2020.
Q 23As of January 2025, a Reel can run up to how long?
Three minutes
Reels started at 15 seconds, then 30, then 90 seconds from June 2022.
Q 24As of November 2024, Reels averaged how many billion views per day?
1
A feature-limited desktop interface followed that November.
Q 15Instagram's 2010 seed round came from Baseline Ventures and which other firm?
Andreessen Horowitz
The $500,000 round closed on March 5, 2010, while the app was still a check-in service.
Q 16Which co-founder of Twitter invested in Instagram's $7 million Series A in 2011?
Jack Dorsey
The round valued the company at around $20 million, a year before it sold for a billion.
Q 17Who became head of Instagram in October 2018 after the founders stepped down?
Adam Mosseri
He later told a Senate hearing the company would bring back a chronological feed option.
Q 18The pilot to hide public like counts began in May 2019 in which country?
Canada
It expanded to six more markets that July and worldwide in November 2019.
Q 19IGTV, the standalone long-video app launched in 2018, was shut down in which year?
2022
The company cited low usage and a shift to short-form video.
Q 20About how many people downloaded the original 2019 Threads messaging app before it was scrapped?
220,000
That was under 0.1% of monthly users; the Threads name was reused for a text network in 2023.
150
Monthly Reels users grew from 1.5 billion in 2022 to 1.8 billion in 2024.
Q 25In which year did the worst outage since 2008 take down Instagram and its sister apps?
2021
The October 4 blackout was traced by security experts to a probable DNS problem.
Q 26How many million dollars did Ireland's Data Protection Commission fine Instagram in 2022?
402
The penalty came under the EU's then-new privacy laws.
Q 27Instagram Notes, launched in December 2022, limit posts to how many characters?
60
Friends can reply to a Note through direct messaging.
Q 28What is the name of the celebrity-conversation podcast Instagram launched in December 2023?
Close Friends Only
Its first episode paired rappers Ice Spice and Doja Cat.
Q 29Which country blocked Instagram in August 2024 after it deleted certain condolence posts?
Turkey
The posts concerned the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Q 30In which year did Instagram finally release a native iPad app?
2025
Until then iPad owners ran the stretched iPhone version.