On Wednesday morning, Facebook encountered a strange glitch that flooded user newsfeed with infinite messages from famous accounts. The identical problem, where their main News Feed was swamped with trivial posts made to pages for musicians like Lady Gaga, Nirvana, and The Beatles, was encountered by many Verge staff members who attempted to use the social networking platform. After three hours of pandemonium, the problem seems to be fixed as of 5:15 AM ET.
According to a tweet from Meta spokesperson Alexandru Voica, the issue was caused by an unnamed “configuration update,” although it has since been fixed.
The flaw was quickly exploited by users, who sent memes to famous people they knew would be widely spread. A photo of a turkey sandwich with the phrase “If you see this share it to another celebrity Facebook page keep the turkey sandwich moving” is one of the often shared images I noticed on my own feed. Everyone who follows that celebrity appears to have seen the picture in their feed at that point.
Other users seized the opportunity to promote cryptocurrencies or spam PayPal contribution links. Although it didn’t seem to be an outage in the conventional sense, users began reporting issues on Downdetector at around 2:00 AM ET. However, Meta’s status dashboard didn’t indicate any problems. The Verge’s request for comment was not immediately answered by a Meta spokesperson.
