Facebook Bug blocked users around the Globe

Today, Facebook users from all over the world suddenly noticed that they could no longer access their accounts. For no apparent reason, she had blocked the platform for alleged violations of community standards. The affected users are really not to blame, which many of them also impressively assured. That has now been confirmed by company spokesman Andy Stone.

He explained that this was a technical problem and that the responsible staff quickly corrected the error that caused it. According to him, the case only affected a smaller number of users. However, since the Facebook platform has an audience in the billions, that can be quite a large number in absolute terms as well. Stone did not provide more specific information about the extent of the incident, nor did the specific trigger.

Trigger unknown

However, the cause can still be reduced to a certain extent. The first stage of evaluating postings related to the so-called community standards is made by AI systems. In principle, human examiners only become active when a user complains about a supposedly wrong classification. In the current case, however, users have probably been wrongly banned due to an order that no longer allows complaints against the account ban.

As user statements revealed, it was probably not a misclassification of current posts that caused the flaw in the Facebook systems. Users reported that they hadn’t actually written any posts for a long time, but rather used their Facebook account as a repository for souvenir photos and only occasionally interacted with contacts from their school days.