San Francisco, Mar 3 (IANS): Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform Instagram briefly hid likes from some of its users, after the company accidentally expanded a long-running test of the feature.

According to a CNN report, several users reported seeing the change on their profiles on Tuesday, with the number of likes replaced with the phrase "and others".

"We've been testing a new experience to hide likes on... posts," a spokesperson for Facebook was quoted by CNN Business.

"We unintentionally added more people to the test today, which was a bug -- we're fixing this issue and restoring like counts to those people as soon as possible," it added.

Instagram has been running limited tests of that change for years. In 2019, the company said it would start removing the number of likes from a limited number of accounts in Canada.

Instagram has not provided a timeline for when it expects the hidden likes to roll out widely.

While followers wouldn't be able to see the total number of likes a post received, the owner of the account still could, Instagram said at the time.

Users could click to see a full list of the accounts who liked the post, but they wouldn't be able to see a number highlighting how many people liked it, the report said.