How to Hide Active Status on Instagram, Turn off Active now on iPhone, Android in 2026

Open your DM inbox from the paper-plane icon and look at the rows. Anyone whose activity status is on shows a green dot beside their profile picture and the words Active now under their name; those who have been offline a while show a last-seen note like "Sent on Friday" instead.

That is exactly how your own row looks in everyone else's inbox right now. Checking here first is useful because it gives you an obvious before-and-after: come back to this screen once you've flipped the setting and your own dot will be gone from other people's view.

Tap your profile picture in the bottom-right corner, then the three-line menu at the top right, and choose Settings and privacy. The list is long and grouped under headings: How you use Instagram covers Saved, Archive, Your activity, Notifications and Time management; Who can see your content holds Account privacy, Close Friends, Crossposting, Blocked and Hide story and live; and below that, How others can interact with you begins with Messages and story replies. Activity status is not in the Who can see your content group, which is where most people look first and give up.

Rather than scrolling, use the search box at the top of Settings and privacy and type a few letters of "show" — Show activity status comes up as the first result. This shortcut is worth remembering generally, because Instagram reorganizes this menu often enough that written directions go stale while the search stays reliable.

If you'd rather navigate manually, the setting sits inside Messages and story replies. Either way you land on the same screen.

The Show activity status screen has a single toggle with a line of explanatory text underneath. Blue means on, which is the default, and tapping it turns it grey.

There is no Save button and no confirmation — the change applies immediately across your account, on every device you are logged in on, and for every person you have ever chatted with. Turning it back on later is the same tap, and Instagram does not tell anyone that you changed it either way.

Instagram enforces this symmetrically: once you hide your own activity status, you can no longer see anyone else's either. The green dots vanish from your inbox and Active now disappears from the top of your chats.

That is the deliberate design, not a bug, and there is no setting that hides you while keeping visibility of others. If seeing when a particular person is online genuinely matters to you, this is the cost you are weighing against your own privacy — decide which you want, because you can't have both.

Turning off activity status covers the green dot and the Active now and recently-active labels. It does not make you invisible in other ways: read receipts still show a Seen marker when you open someone's message, your name still appears in the viewer list of anyone's story you watch, and your own story remains visible to whoever your account privacy allows.

If your goal is broader than the online indicator, look separately at Account privacy for who can follow you, Hide story and live for specific people, and Restrict or Block for individual accounts. Activity status is one narrow switch, not a privacy mode.