Facebook experienced a bizarre bug on Wednesday morning that filled user feeds with endless posts from celebrity accounts. Multiple Verge staffers who attempted to use the social media network experienced the same issue, where their main News Feed was flooded with minor posts sent to pages for artists like Lady Gaga, Nirvana, and The Beatles. As of 5:15AM ET the issue appears to have been resolved after creating three hours of chaos.
Writing on Twitter, Meta spokesperson Alexandru Voica blamed an unspecified “configuration change” for the problem, and said it had since been resolved.
Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook Feed. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
— Alexandru Voica (@alexvoica) August 24, 2022
Users were quick to take advantage of the bug and to send memes to celebrities that they knew would be shared far and wide. One widely shared image I saw on my own feed features a picture of a turkey sandwich with the caption, “If you see this share it to another celebrities Facebook page keep the turkey sandwich moving.” It seems everyone that follows that celebrity then saw the image in their feed.
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Other users took advantage of the situation by spamming PayPal donation links or promoting cryptocurrency projects.
Although it didn’t appear to be an outage in the traditional sense, users took to Downdetector to report problems starting at just before 2:00AM ET. However, a status dashboard for Meta didn’t report any issues through the period. A representative from Meta did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Update August 24th, 6:11AM ET: Updated to note that the issue appears to have been resolved, and added statement from Meta spokesperson Alexandru Voica.