Facebook is a useful tool to keep up with the lives of your loved ones and old acquaintances. Sometimes you do some snooping on your ex-boyfriend or frenemy which may be your worst nightmare if they ever had to know. Recently, that worst nightmare has become a reality for some Facebook users.

There was a bug on Facebook in May 2023 whereby if you have searched for a Facebook profile or browsed your suggested friend list recently you would have inadvertently sent them a friend request. Awkward.

Meta, the Facebook parent company, described the glitch as a bug in the recent app update and the bug has since been squashed. Although the company issued an apology to its users for the “inconvenience” the Facebook glitch has caused, there is no way to rectify the embarrassment faced by their users having to possibly explain themselves to their searches.

It could be that as a result of cutting costs in the company and laying off thousands of employees, Facebook is now dropping the ball on the major key functionality of the company to save a buck. This cannot be good for business when users have been complaining about glitches since August 2022.

Some users went on to say that they are “being overcharged for ads” and that their “feeds are filled with posts from users not on their friend list”. In an effort to have a “year of efficiency”, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by cutting costs on the things that make or break a company the layoffs seem to have done the complete opposite, the last heard of layoffs being in April 2023.

In a world where privacy for the user is continually denied, Facebook being one of the forerunners, the Facebook glitch signifies more than just an ‘oopsie’ in the digital world. It is an infringement on users’ basic rights to privacy and therefore requires more than just an apology to rectify the matter.

The May 2023 Facebook glitch took approximately 24 hours to repair and by then the damage had already been done. This may have been one of the worst glitches in Facebook history and probably the most memorable one given the panic of attempting to delete the friend requests and the trauma experienced after the fact by being outed by Facebook for snooping.

In conclusion, although many may have lived down the embarrassment by now, the drama of the recent Facebook glitches remains. Being caught in the midst of a Facebook glitch once or twice may give you a little chuckle at the havoc and embarrassment it caused, but how many more times until a glitch in your online world becomes a real cause for concern?

Sources
SBS
Time Out News
The Edge