If you tried to log onto Facebook on Wednesday morning, you might have noticed things were even freakier than usual. Instead of smiling photos of pals and snarky takes from people's nearests and dearests, users' timelines were flooded with posts like 'I MISS YOU' and 'hi, BFF' from total strangers. These had been posted on celebrity fan pages and groups, but a quirky little bug in the system pulled them to the top of timelines.
Maybe you wondered where all your friends had gone. Maybe you were furious that your timeline was suddenly a sea of Eminem mentions. Maybe you actually quite enjoyed the memes. Either way, Meta, Facebook's parent company, apologised 'for any inconvenience' and said the issue, which lasted from 7am to 9am BST, had been resolved.
A spokesperson said, 'Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook feed. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted.'
Now, some of us don't mind a sneak peek into the comings, goings and 'greetings from Rwanda!' posts of Taylor Swift fan pages — and it seemed that people were largely deluged with posts from people they'd liked.
But others worried that the site had been hacked, which seems a perfectly reasonable concern given how much of our data swirls around Mark Zuckerberg's billion-dollar baby. A total of 81% of the reports received by Downdetector, an outage tracking application, flagged issues with Facebook feeds, with the rest specifically highlighting the app or website. But, ultimately, this was simply a case of Facebook making their own mess. It was 100% that glitch.
Naturally, people used other social media sites to criticise Facebook. One Twitter user said: 'My feed is spammed with random people posting on celebrity pages?' While another wrote: 'Hey @facebook, are you OK bro?'
The Independent even reported that some users looked to take advantage of the issue, posting strange pictures in the hope that users would see them. One popular post included a picture of a turkey sandwich, and encouraged anyone who saw it to post on other celebrities’ pages.
Other, darker posts attempted to use the bug to push their personal projects, such as smaller cryptocurrencies.
It has been a bumpy time for Facebook and its fans — although given that there are nearly 3bn of them, they're not ready to pack things in just yet.
The company has also been under the spotlight after a series of performance hiccoughs. In October, WhatsApp and other apps run by Meta stopped workingfor six hours caused by configuration changes to its routers.
That had some unusual knock on effects. A baker in Mexico City described to local media her reaction when her phone started ringing and vibrating with an influx of calls and messages from customers.
'It's crazy,' Elizabeth Mustillo said, adding: 'No one ever calls any more.'