Did Taylor Swift comment on your feed? Facebook’s bizarre glitch that spammed from celebrity pages
- Dozens of users complained that their Facebook feeds were being spammed with comments and posts sent to celebrity pages
- People following major stars, such as Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Lady Gaga, were particularly inundated with unwanted posts
Facebook users reported experiencing a strange glitch on Wednesday. Instead of seeing posts from contacts and pages they follow, many users’ feeds were suddenly spammed with comments or posts on celebrity pages.
Downdetector, a site used by users of various tech platforms to log outages, displayed dozens of comments from users, complaining that their Facebook feeds were being spammed with comments and posts sent to the pages of famous people.
People following stars with a major following – such as Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Lady Gaga – were particularly inundated with unwanted posts and their feeds almost completely clogged by fan comments.
Data from Downdetector showed a huge spike in the number of issues being reported in a 24-hour period. Anyone following the popular pages had their news feeds flooded with the posts, rather than filtered out as normal.
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Representatives for Meta said the issues were caused by a “configuration change” was responsible for the glitch.
“Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook Feed. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience,” Meta said
While some users took advantage of the glitch to flood fellow users’ feeds with memes, others attempted to monetise the bug by sharing PayPal and crypto links, according to American technology news website The Verge.
One user alleged, via Downdetector, that some of the comments circulating under celebrity posts were “seriously offensive” and “terror-related”.
Another user complained they felt like they had been hacked and said they had tried to recover their account with no success.
According to users’ posts, the issue began around 2am ET and were resolved around three hours later at 5.15am.
The Verge reported that Facebook’s status dashboard did not report any issues at the time.
Earlier this year, another Facebook bug was reportedly found to have amplified misinformation on users’ news feeds rather than combat it.
In March 2022, The Verge reported that a software bug had unknowingly been promoting posts containing misinformation, nudity, and violence on Facebook users’ news feed for six months.
Additional reporting by dpa
