Facebook Thought Everyone Was Dead

Facebook Thought Everyone Was Dead

A few days ago, if you checked out Facebook, there was a high likelihood that the social network would tell everyone that you were dead. It said everyone was dead. Everyone was dead, according to Facebook. Even Zuck.

Screenshot via Facebook

Users on Twitter and elsewhere reported the interesting glitch: Facebook thought everyone had died, and was displaying the memorialised version of people’s profiles. A banner at the top of profiles showed a message that read “We hope people who love [name] will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate [his/her] life.”

We saw it ourselves. It’s very weird to see the dead version of your Facebook profile.

Was it the social network’s attempt to comfort users in this time of political turmoil, a time when we wish our political reality was but a nightmare? Or was it some sort of glitch? We reached out to a Facebook spokesperson by phone, who told us Facebook was looking into the problem, and would get back to us when the company had figured out what’s happening.

Eventually, everyone came “back” to life. Some users, however, reported that their Facebook friends who actually died were popping up as alive. We have reached out to Facebook and will update the story if we get a response.

Update, 4:22PM: It appears the living are back to being alive, and the dead are once again resting.

Update, 5:24PM: A Facebook Spokesperson sent Gizmodo the following statement:

For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialised profiles was mistakenly posted to other accounts. This was a terrible error that we have now fixed. We are very sorry that this happened and we worked as quickly as possible to fix it.


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