Followers posted memes to take advantage of the carnage
Facebook encountered an odd bug on Wednesday morning that filled client channels with vast posts from superstar accounts. Various Verge staff members who endeavored to utilize the virtual entertainment network encountered a similar issue, where their principal News Feed was overflowed with minor presents sent on pages for specialists like Lady Gaga, Nirvana, and The Beatles. As of 5:15AM ET the issue seems to have been settled in the wake of making three hours of confusion.
Clients rushed to exploit the bug and to send images to big names that they knew would be shared all over. One broadly shared picture I saw on my own channel includes an image of a turkey sandwich with the subtitle, “Assuming you see this offer it to another big names Facebook page keep the turkey sandwich moving.” It appears everybody that follows that superstar then, at that point, saw the picture in their channel.
Other users took advantage of the situation by spamming PayPal donation links or promoting cryptocurrency projects.
Although it didn’t appear to be an outage in the traditional sense, users took to Downdetector to report problems starting at just before 2:00AM ET. However, a status dashboard for Meta didn’t report any issues through the period. A representative from Meta did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.