After facing a rather widespread outage a couple days ago, Facebook seems to be acting up for some users once again. The social networking website was either not letting users login or was down for some in the crowd. While others also reported that they had been automatically logged out of their accounts and were unable to log back in. This picture seemed sketchy and some folks reached the conclusion that their Facebook accounts have been compromised in a hack.
And as usual, Facebook users took to the usual discussion spot — Twitter to voice their concerns about the account logins.
My #facebook account is locked and I keep getting a error message even after I try to verify my identity. What gives?
— Angry Laredoan!! (@PanchoRancho27) February 24, 2017
My #Facebook account just deactivated itself, and I just an error message when I try to reactivate it. ? ANYONE ELSE? Paranoia setting in.
— SongsOfTheResistance (@Songs2Resist2) February 24, 2017
Their fears were further heightened as the social media giant was sending out mails saying user’s accounts have been hacked and they need to follow certain account recovery protocols immediately. The said email from their security team only added to the fire as users were not able to complete the recovery workflow. This further frustrated them and added to the fears of their social identity being in the hands of a hacker.
But, there’s nothing really to worry about as Facebook has now issued a statement saying the ruckus was caused due to an internal error in their account recovery system. The statement further adds,
Earlier today an error in one of our systems designed to help prevent suspicious account access sent a small set of people to our account recovery flow unnecessarily. We have fixed the issue and are in the process of clearing the affected accounts from this recovery flow. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Yes, no hackers were involved in today’s outage. Facebook further goes on to state that users could ignore messages sent by their security team. They need not follow the account recovery process as the same was delivered due to a technical glitch. It doesn’t relate to any hacking attempts on your account whatsoever. Facebook will eventually fix your account and the same will be back to its normal state soon.
This is, however, not the first time some technical glitch has caused mass ruckus among Facebook’s social community. It had earlier pronounced millions of its users dead, including its founder Mark Zuckerberg, due to some bug introduced in their profiling system. Heck, it is also not the first time some technical bug has affected a social media giant. Twitter is also one, who mistakenly removed the accounts of a handful of its users. And it included the founder/CEO Jack Dorsey as well.
