Facebook hit by strange glitch as bizarre posts start appearing in feeds
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Facebook has been hit by a bizarre glitch, with strange posts appearing users’ feeds.
Those logging onto Facebook on Wednesday morning just saw a flood of posts from strangers, which had been originally posted on the pages of celebrities.
The issue appeared to stem from a technical problem with the system that automatically decides what posts will show up on on the news feed.
Users rushed to post memes, taking advantage of the chaos to spam other people’s news feeds. Others complained that the issue had meant that Facebook was practically broken.
The bug means that if anyone posts a comment on a celebrity’s page, it will be pushed into the feed of anyone who follows that celebrity.
Anyone on Facebook can post a comment on a celebrity’s page. Usually, those comments are filtered out by the algorithm, meaning that the news feed may see posts from the actual celebrities but not from their friends.
It is that system that appears to be broken, making the site practically unusable to anyone who wants to see what their friends or favourite pages are posting.
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.
On Twitter, other users suggested that the site may have been hacked. But there was nothing to indicate that the problem was not Facebook’s own fault.
Tracking website Down Detector showed thousands of reports of problems, with users across the world reporting issues.
Meta does run its own status page, but that site is intended to track business and developer tools rather than the site itself. That page showed no problems.
Later, Facebook said it aware of the problem and working to fix it.
“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,” a spokesperson for parent company Meta said.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments