Facebook down for thousands of users globally, shows spam posts from celebs

US-based social media firm Facebook has reportedly gone down for thousands of users across the world with a "strange bug". This glitch in the Meta-owned platform is filling user feeds with random posts from celebrity accounts. It was first reported by DownDetector.com, an online platform that provides real time information on website outages. 

As per the website, users of the social media app were reporting issues with their feed and also the strange glitch has filled celebrities, like Tom Cruise, Rihanna, Sachin Tendulkar, Gordon Ramsay, Deepika Padukone, Lady Gaga, Nirvana, and The Beatles and others' Facebook walls with random messages and memes from their fans. 

In India, users started complaining about the issues around 10 am. As per the tracking website, 43% of users have reported issues with the app, 40% relating to the newsfeed and 16% relating to the website in general. 

Users took to Twitter to complain that the Facebook homepage is not showing posts from friends, instead throwing up random posts on celebrity pages.  

This is, however, not the first time that Facebook has faced issues related to outages or technical glitches. On October 4, 2021, Facebook and its subsidiaries, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, became globally unavailable for a period of six to seven hours. The outage also prevented anyone trying to use “Log in with Facebook” from accessing third-party sites. Later, Facebook issued a statement confirming the outage was due to a configuration change to the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between the company’s data centres, which had a cascading effect, bringing all its services to a halt.  

This time, however, there is no proof that the website has been compromised or hacked. Until now, Facebook has also not confirmed any outage on the app or issued any statement regarding the same. 

Tech glitches and outages (often called downtime) are becoming a regular phenomenon, which can have a significant impact on the reputation and bottom line. 

On August 10, micro-blogging site Twitter was down for a brief period, affecting nearly 40,000 users worldwide, even though the social media platform, said that they have “fixed the issue”. Same week, Alphabet’s Google services faced a brief outage, affecting at least 1,338 servers globally across more than 40 countries including India. On July 21, Microsoft’s Teams app faced major outage with more than 4,000 users said that they were unable to access or leverage any features on the app.    

Analyst firm Gartner has said that the average cost of network downtime is around $5,600 per minute or around $300,000 per hour.