Facebook has been hit by a bizarre glitch, with strange posts appearing users’ feeds.
Those logging onto Facebook on Wednesday morning just saw a flood of posts from strangers, which had been originally posted on the pages of celebrities.
The issue appeared to stem from a technical problem with the system that automatically decides what posts will show up on on the news feed.
Users rushed to post memes, taking advantage of the chaos to spam other people’s news feeds. Others complained that the issue had meant that Facebook was practically broken.
The bug means that if anyone posts a comment on a celebrity’s page, it will be pushed into the feed of anyone who follows that celebrity.
Anyone on Facebook can post a comment on a celebrity’s page. Usually, those comments are filtered out by the algorithm, meaning that the news feed may see posts from the actual celebrities but not from their friends.
It is that system that appears to be broken, making the site practically unusable to anyone who wants to see what their friends or favourite pages are posting.
Some users looked to take advantage of the issue, posting strange pictures in the hope that users would see them. One popular post included a picture of a turkey sandwich, and encouraged anyone who saw it to post on other celebrities’ pages.
Other, darker posts attempted to use the bug to push their personal projects, such as smaller cryptocurrencies.
On Twitter, other users suggested that the site may have been hacked. But there was nothing to indicate that the problem was not Facebook’s own fault.
Tracking website Down Detector showed thousands of reports of problems, with users across the world reporting issues.
Meta does run its own status page, but that site is intended to track business and developer tools rather than the site itself. That page showed no problems.
