Nauman
Facebook was hit by a major bug earlier today, but this time it had nothing to do with a network glitch, so most people were able to stay online. This time, the strange bug caused a configuration change, which flooded people’s feeds with celebrity posts.
Facebook has now fixed the issue, so user feeds should be back to normal.
The glitch in Facebook’s algorithm bombarded people’s feeds with random fan messages directed at celebrity accounts. These messages would target several celebrities including Taylor Swift, Shakira, Eminem, Lady Gaga, and numerous others. This is what it looked like.
The problem quickly gained traction on other social networks and it is still trending on Twitter with over 8 thousand tweets and counting. For some reason, the trending hashtag is called #facebookhacked and there are thousands of people meming on Facebook at the moment.
Several users also reported an outage on Facebook on Wednesday, according to a plethora of reports shared on DownDetector, a global connection tracker for online services. It is unclear if the outage had anything to do with the aforementioned glitch.
It turned out to be an enormous bug since it affected some of the most followed accounts on Facebook such as Christiano Ronaldo, Rihanna, Shakira, and others, all of whom have more than 100 million followers each. It also affected multiple countries across desktop and mobile devices including Pakistan.
According to Facebook, the issue had to do with a maintenance malfunction that disrupted communication between Facebook’s data centers. The company’s stock declined by 5% during the time, reducing CEO Mark Zuckerburg’s net worth by a whopping $8.4 billion.
