If you go look at your Facebook right now, there’s a high likelihood that the social network is telling everyone you are dead. It says everyone is dead. Everyone is dead, according to Facebook. Even Zuck.
Users on Twitter and elsewhere are reporting an interesting new glitch: Facebook thinks everyone has died, and is displaying the memorialized version of people’s profiles. A banner at the top of profiles shows a message that reads “We hope people who love [name] will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate [his/her] life.” We’ve seen it ourselves. It’s very weird to see the dead version of your Facebook profile.
Is it the social network’s attempt to comfort users in this time of political turmoil, a time when we wish our political reality was but a nightmare? Or is it some sort of glitch? We’ve reached out to a Facebook spokesperson by phone, who told us Facebook is currently looking into the problem, and will get back to us when the company has figured out what’s happening.
https://twitter.com/embed/status/797176884962263040
shoutout to Facebook for telling me I'm dead!!!!! pic.twitter.com/Zoe3Hsn3HY
— ella dawson (@brosandprose) November 11, 2016
https://twitter.com/embed/status/797175046099914752
https://twitter.com/embed/status/797174382128988160
https://twitter.com/embed/status/797177468083982336
https://twitter.com/embed/status/797181732105486336
Update, 4:06PM: It appears everyone is back to life. Some users, however, are reporting that their Facebook friends who actually died are popping up as alive. We have reached out to Facebook and will update the story if we get a response.
“Appears to be a bug, not compromised accounts” Facebook spox tells me
— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) November 11, 2016
Update, 4:22PM: It appears the living are back to being alive, and the dead are once again resting.
Update, 5:24PM: A Facebook Spokesperson sent Gizmodo the following statement:
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.
