If you tried to access your Facebook account yesterday or so, then you were in for a surprise (and not the good kind). Instead of seeing posts from your friends and updates from Groups and other individuals you follow, your Feed was flooded with random posts, especially those that were originally posted on the pages of celebrities.
You are not alone in your bewilderment as several users across the world faced the same issue. The reason is simple – Meta’s flagship social media platform suffered a massive glitch on Wednesday. However, the issue has been resolved since then, and Facebook is up and running like usual.
The nature of the glitch was strange – it did not prevent users from accessing Facebook or show errors (such as 404 – Page Not Found). Instead, it flooded the Feeds of the affected users with content and posts sent to celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Tom Cruise, Deepika Padukone, Eminem, and Shakira on their fan pages and groups.
“Facebook has need hit by a major spam attack. Lots of Facebook Pages of celebrities have had spammy memes posted to them in the last 24 hours,” informed Matt Navarro, a well-known social media expert, in a tweet.
Downdetector, which is the place to go to and keep track of things when such glitches and outages take place, informed that over 300 users posted complaints about seeing random posts on their feeds. These complaints kept on increasing from 11:03 AM and reached its peak at 1:03 PM with 339 complaints. Since then, the number of complaints subsided, and as of 8:03 PM, there are only four reports of complaints of Facebook outages.
These massive outage on Facebook occurred on both its desktop and mobile versions – according to Downdetector, 59% of users reported complaints regarding their Facebook apps. 26% of complaints were regarding Feeds, and the remaining 14% were complaints about Facebook’s website.
Apart from reporting complaints, the affected users expressed their displeasure in the only way they know how – posting on Twitter and spreading memes.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble with their Facebook Feed. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience,” said a spokesperson for Meta.
Later, they added that a “configuration change” was responsible for people running into trouble with their Feed.
