Instagram is going to show users older photos they might have missed before new ones in a major change to its feed. The change has since sparked a backlash as people fear missing out on having their photos seen.

The photo service’s users have grown accustomed to a time-ordered feed in which the latest photos appear at the top. But on Tuesday night, Instagram announced that it would begin ordering posts using an algorithm that tries to guess what the user wants to see, changing the chronological feed it has used since it was founded in 2010.

This means that when users open the Instagram app, they will see a photo from a close friend or a popular celebrity posted the previous night above a blurry snap of a former colleague’s breakfast posted the morning after, similar to the way that Facebook arranges statuses it thinks are more interesting or important at the top of its News Feed.

Instagram said that people tend to miss 70 per cent of the photos in their feed, with it becoming harder to keep up as the service explodes in popularity. Instagram has doubled users to 400 million in the last two years, meaning increasingly-crowded feeds as people follow more accounts.