Did Facebook tell your friends that you had died?

As BBC News reports:

An unusual bug on Facebook briefly labelled many people as dead.

The error on Friday caused the social network to show a memorial banner on user profiles for people who were still alive.

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Users posted status updates to reassure friends and family they were not dead, despite Facebook’s message.

“Victims” of the Facebook death bug included founder Mark Zuckerberg himself.

A Facebook spokesperson apologies for the monumental cock-up:

“This was a terrible error that we have now fixed. We are very sorry that this happened.”

What was Facebook motto, again? Oh yeah, “move fast and break things”.

Hope they didn’t break too much when they told folks their loved ones had died.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.