Featured Image Credit: Geoff Smith / Alamy Stock Photo / Twitter
Topics: Facebook
Anish Vij
Facebook has explained why everyone's newsfeed was flooded with bizarre posts on celebrities' pages, adding that it had fixed the 'glitch'.
Social media users have been sharing screenshots of their homepage feeds, which were overrun with random messages on celebrity accounts including Taylor Swift, Snoop Dogg and Eminem’s.
Well, a spokesperson for the platform has put the issue down to a 'configuration change'.
Alexandru Voica, Technology Communications Manager at Meta, said on Twitter: "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, and we apologise for any inconvenience."
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In an earlier statement, Meta confirmed to UNILAD: “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.”
On Wednesday (24 August) morning, social media users jumped over to Twitter to share snaps of the glitch, writing messages like: “Yeah my Facebook has gone dead weird this morning”, “Is anyone else’s Facebook weird? I can only see things people are putting on celebrity walls?” and “Is anyone else’s Facebook weird? My entire timeline is people posting on celebs' timelines.”
Anyone is able to comment on a celebrity’s Facebook page, but normally, messages are filtered by Meta, meaning only posts written by the celebrity themselves will show up on fans’ feeds.
But midweek, the comments of anyone who had posted on a celebrity’s page were showing up in the news feeds of whoever followed said famous person.
The glitch also removed all regular posts from family and friends from users’ news feeds.
Down Detector - a website where people can log outages - first started receiving reports of the glitch between 6am and 7am on Wednesday.
Sky News reported that the issue affected users across Britain, Spain, Canada, Mexico, Italy, France, the US, Poland, and Australia.
While it’s now been confirmed the issue was due to a configuration change, when the glitch first appeared, many people were convinced it was the work of a hacker.
One person tweeted: “Spent this morning unfollowing all celebrities on Facebook because of the hack.”
Another person tweeted: “I don’t have Facebook but reading here on #facebookhacked is delicious - some media outlets calling it a glitch or a bug, but this looks 100% like a hack, amazing.”
“Is this a worldwide hack on #Facebook ?? Same crazy s**t this is,” penned another Twitter user.
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