Facebook briefly goes down every now and again, but never before like this. For a few hours beginning around 11:30 p.m. PT Tuesday, Facebook users began complaining of a strange bug: Their feeds consisted only of random people posting on celebrities’ walls. Scrolling down my own feed during the few hours the glitch was unresolved, all I could see were posts, sent from people I’ve never met, to the official pages of The Beatles, Gorillaz and System of a Down.
DownDetector received a spike in complaints about Facebook, indicating a widespread problem. Judging by tweets from confused Facebook users, however, it’s not like Facebook was down per se — just broken.
Taking advantage of the unusual glitch, users began posting memes to celebrities pages, like the one above. Some jokingly circulated their Venmo and PayPal details asking for donations, and others promoted their own small business by posting links to celebrity accounts.
At the time of writing, the bug appears to have been mostly fixed. Reports from DownDetector are near baseline level.
Facebook acknowledged that something had gone wrong.
“Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook Feed,” a Meta spokesperson said to CNET. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
