A rather unusual bug made its way to Facebook yesterday afternoon, which saw tons of users being erroneously pronounced dead on the popular social media website. The bug was reported to be widespread, and flagged thousands of user profiles as "dead" across the globe. A number of celebrities and high-profile personalities were the victims of the bug as well, including Mark Zuckerberg.
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A banner message on the top of the affected profile pages read:
We hope people who love
will find comfort in the thing others share to remember and celebrate his life.
The message initially caused shock and distraught among the relations of the affected users, however, once the situation clarified, several found humorous angles to the story.
Facebook Thursday: Fake news is not a problem
— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) November 11, 2016
Facebook Friday: Mark Zuckerberg is dead. Your friends are dead. We are all dead.
In a statement to Engadget, a Facebook spokesperson cited the incident as "a terrible error", saying that:
For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialized profiles was mistakenly posted to other accounts. This was a terrible error that we have now fixed. We are very sorry that this happened and we worked as quickly as possible to fix it.
It is important to note that Facebook introduced a rather morbid feature last year which allows users to set up "legacy" contacts that will partially control their account as a memorial page if they pass away. The recent incident can be viewed as an inadvertent reminder to utilize the feature if you haven't already.
Source: Engadget | "I see dead people" GIF via Giphy
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