In an exciting paper, J. Bedrossian and N. Masmoudi established the stability of the 2D Couette flow in Gevrey spaces of index greater than 1/2. I will talk about recent joint work with N. Masmoudi, which proves, in the opposite direction, the instability of the Couette flow in Gevrey spaces of index smaller than 1/2. This confirms, to a large extent, that the transient growth predicted heuristically in earlier works does exist and has the expected strength. The proof is based on the framework of the stability result, with a few crucial new observations. I will also discuss related works regarding Landau damping, and possible extensions to infinite time.