After a glitch revealed their stalking practices, devastated Facebook users closed their accounts.
Featured Image Credit: TikTok/jacintaandcarty. Vladimir Stanisic / Alamy Stock Photo
Facebook clients have hurried to deactivate their records after a humiliating error uncovered who they had been following.
Could you please kindly excuse me for a moment? Just a few emails need to be removed from my junk mail.
Friends requests were sent automatically to the profiles of users you had previously viewed due to a system error.
The bug had many jumping to their screens, frantically attempting to erase their records because of the bungle.
A Twitter user posted a brief clip of them clicking on a Facebook user's profile and sending an automatic friend request to warn about the dangers of social media sleuthing.
You might want to avoid clicking on Facebook user profiles for a while. They wrote in the caption, "It's sending friend requests automatically."
Another person said, I'm going to delete Facebook right now because I only use it to stalk.
umm... you might want to avoid clicking on user profiles on Facebook for a bit. it's auto-sending friend requests. pic.twitter.com/ettkXhvXV1
— Oliver Cragg (@olliecapa26) May 12, 2023
Another shared: Haha my ex from a long time back has friended and unfriended me on Facebook on the grounds that yesterday there was an error where on the off chance that you went on a profile, it consequently sent a solicitation, meaning she probably been Facebook following discussing whether to say anything now."
Another person said, In the event that you get a solicitation from me, I'm not following you, erasing Facebook."
A spokesperson issued a statement to The Daily Beast, revealing that the issue has since been resolved.
Credit: KSCHiLI / Alamy Stock Photo
“We fixed a bug related to a recent app update that caused some Facebook friend requests to be sent mistakenly,” the spokesperson said.
“We've stopped this from happening and we apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
However, if you’re still paranoid that you’ve been affected by this tech error, head to facebook.com/friends.
From there, click 'Friend Requests' in the left-hand tab, then hit 'View send requests' to see the pending requests.
This comes after the social media giant led by Mark Zuckerberg also suffered a significant glitch in August, leading many users’ feeds to become inundated with content shared on celebrity pages made by complete strangers.
So if you saw heaps of memes about Taylor Swift or The Rock, this is why.
Internet outage tracker Downdetector reported to have received more than 1,400 reports of Facebook problems, with the majority of complaints regarding their feed.
