Facebook users report bizarre glitch that spammed their feeds with posts from celebrity pages
- Facebook users said they experienced a strange glitch on Wednesday morning.
- Multiple users complained that their feeds were being spammed with posts from celebrity accounts.
Facebook users reported experiencing a strange glitch on Wednesday morning.
Downdetector, a site used by users of various tech platforms to log outages, displayed dozens of comments from users, complaining that their Facebook feeds were being spammed with comments and posts sent to celebrity pages.
Data from Downdetector showed a huge spike in the number of issues being reported in a 24-hour period.
Anyone following the popular pages had their news feeds flooded with the posts, rather than filtered out as normal.
Representatives for Meta told Insider that the issues were caused by a "configuration change."
The 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, and we apologize for any inconvenience."
While some users took advantage of the glitch to flood fellow users' feeds with memes, others attempted to monetize the bug by sharing PayPal and crypto links, per The Verge.
One user alleged via Downdetector that some of the comments circulating under celeb posts were "seriously offensive" and "terror-related."
Another user complained they felt like they had been hacked and said they had tried to recover their account with no success.
According to users' posts, the issue began around 2:00 a.m. ET and were resolved around three hours later at 5:15 a.m. ET.
The Verge reported that Facebook's status dashboard did not report any issues at the time.
Earlier this year, another Facebook bug was reportedly found to have amplified misinformation on users' News Feeds rather than combat it. In March 2022, The Verge reported that a software bug had unknowingly been promoting posts containing misinformation, nudity, and violence on Facebook users' news feed for six months.