Facebook plagued by ‘celebrity glitch’

Thousands of users reported their Facebook news feeds were replaced by random posts to celebrities.

Social media giant Facebook was plagued by a widespread glitch on Wednesday afternoon, with users reporting significant issues with their news feeds. Picture: AFP

Social media giant Facebook was plagued by a widespread glitch on Wednesday afternoon, with users reporting significant issues with their news feeds.

According to outage tracker DownDetector.com.au, Facebook was hit by the glitch around 4pm AEST, which seemingly affected the algorithm that decides what posts are surfaced to users. Many users reported seeing random posts from users to celebrities on their Facebook news feeds.

The outage website said 95 per cent of complaints related to Facebook’s news feed, with 4 per cent of problems relating to comments, and 1 per cent ‘posting’. More than 1000 Australian users reported issues on the platform.

The issue was resolved by about 8.45pm AEST.

“Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook Feed,” a Meta spokesman said.

“We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience.”

What has happened to my Facebook feed?! pic.twitter.com/0HRjzKnyB6

— Shannon Grixti (@shancake_) August 24, 2022

Is anyone else’s Facebook broken or have I been hacked. This is my entire feed pic.twitter.com/nQwvtLqRjT

— chris🧣 (@chrismearle) August 24, 2022

Anyone else have a #Facebook news feed that looks like this… 😬 pic.twitter.com/Z4iFjyO4fq

— Stewart Sowman-Lund (@StewartLundNZ) August 24, 2022

The issue did not appear to be affect Facebook subsidiary apps like Instagram or WhatsApp, and there’s no indication the company was the victim of a hacking attempt.

The news comes after Facebook parent company Meta reached a $54m settlement of a lawsuit in the US accusing it of violating user privacy, by tracking their movements through their smartphone devices without permission.

The settlement involved claims that Facebook had broken California law by gathering data from users who turned off location services on their mobile devices, and that the company could infer users’ location from their IP addresses.

It then used that information to send the users targeted advertising. The settlement still requires a judge’s approval.

The claims echo those of the Federal Court, which this month ordered fellow tech giant Google to pay a $60m fine for collecting Android location data without user consent, in one of the largest ever penalties in corporate Australian history.

Australia’s competition and consumer watchdog estimated that some 1.3 million users in Australia may have viewed a screen on Android devices found by the Federal Court to have breached consumer law.

Originally published as Facebook plagued by ‘celebrity glitch’