Glitch turns Facebook timeline into "disaster"


Users reported their Facebook feed "broken" as it filled with random comments from celebrity pages.

An apparent bug has turned the Facebook feed into a mess of a timeline for many users, who were spammed with a stream of comments from popular pages they follow.

It means that if anyone from anywhere has posted something to Lady Gaga's page, her entire cohort of followers would see that comment on their news feed.

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The glitch hit users sporadically – with chaotic timelines reported in the US and Europe. Meta said in a statement to Cybernews that "a configuration change" caused some people to face problems and apologized "for any inconvenience." They said that issue was now resolved.

Many of those affected flocked to Twitter to check what was happening. "Is anyone else's Facebook broken, or have I been hacked," one user pondered, just to be reassured that this appeared to be a widespread bug.

Another user tweeted that Facebook's timeline feed "is a disaster right now," later adding that it went back to normal for a while – only to break again.

While some users went to Twitter to muse about the chaos that ensued on Facebook, others were reported to take advantage of the bug to share memes, crowdfunding campaigns, and crypto scams to celebrity pages with millions of followers.

While Facebook was technically on, the outage tracking website Downdetector.com saw an uptick of reports trickling in the early hours on Wednesday.

Earlier this month, a "technical issue" took down Google and several other services such as Gmail and Google Maps. The company apologized for the temporary disruption of service, which it said was caused by a software update.

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