Did Facebook tell your friends that you had died?

Death bug strikes many on social network.

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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@gcluley

Facebook death bug

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 is a veteran of the cybersecurity 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 analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

One comment on “Did Facebook tell your friends that you had died?”

  1. drsolly

    I was just about to make a claim on my life insurance, and then they decided that I wasn't dead after all.

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