Facebook Experiences A Strange Glitch Spamming Celebrity Pages - Was It Hacked?

Joaquin Victor Tacla, Tech Times 24 August 2022, 05:08 am

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(Photo : KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images))
Photo taken on October 18, 2021 in Moscow shows the US online social media and social networking service Facebook's logo on a tablet screen. - Facebook on October 18, 2021, announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the "metaverse", a virtual reality version of the internet that the tech giant sees as the future.

Website tracker DownDetector.com has recently detected an outage on the popular social media platform Facebook. However, it was no ordinary outage."

As reported first by news.com.au, Facebook users reported seeing numerous random posts about celebrities on their news feed even though they haven't followed these pages.

43% of users have complained about problems with the app, 40% have complained about problems with their newsfeed, and 16% have complained about problems with the website as a whole.

But memers and fans did not let the glitch get in their way of making humor out of the situation. Many of them took advantage of the bug to introduce themselves to the larger Facebook audience.

One user took to Taylor Swift's feed and asked her if she could "cover some Bollywood songs". Another user went to Adele's page and wrote, "I don't know but I want to try it too, hello!"

However, there is currently no evidence to imply that the platform has been hacked, and Facebook has not officially confirmed any downtime or issue with its website.

The issue appeared after Meta, the corporation in charge of Facebook, settled for $54 million in the US after being accused of violating users' privacy. The case was based on a charge that the platform had unlawfully tracked user activities using their smartphones.

There have been allegations that Facebook broke Californian law by collecting data from users who had previously turned off location services on their phones and that the company instead used users' IP addresses to determine their locations.