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Social media users report bizarre Facebook glitch

Facebook users have mercilessly capitalised on Wednesday afternoon’s global glitch, which completely turned millions of timelines upside down.

Calls for regulation against Facebook

Facebook users have reported widespread glitches on Wednesday afternoon.

Website tracker DownDetector.com.au reported an outage on the massive social media platform around 4pm AEST.

Users reported seeing dozens of random posts to celebrities appearing on their feed, many from pages they hadn’t even followed.

Forty-three per cent of users have reported issues with the app, 40 per cent relating to the newsfeed and 16 per cent relating to the website in general.

Facebook has not yet confirmed any outage or issue with the website — and there is currently no evidence to suggest the website has been hacked.

Cheeky users have already begun using the glitch to say hello to the wider Facebook community.

Memes aimed at Mark Zuckerberg flooded some of the most-liked pages on Facebook Wednesday, as users capitalised on the global glitch.

One user wrote to Adele’s Facebook page, “I don’t know but I want to try it too, hello!”, while another wrote, “Hey mum, I’m famous”.

Facebook users have reported widespread glitches on Wednesday afternoon. Source: DownDetector
Facebook users have reported widespread glitches on Wednesday afternoon. Source: DownDetector
Memes flooded some of the most-liked pages on Facebook Wednesday, as users capitalised on the global glitch.
Memes flooded some of the most-liked pages on Facebook Wednesday, as users capitalised on the global glitch.

The glitch came after Meta, the company presiding over Facebook, reached a $54m settlement in the US after being accused of breaching user privacy. The case centred around an accusation the platform had been tracking movements of users via their smartphones without permission.

There were claims Facebook had broken Californian law by gathering data from users who previously switched off location services on their phones — and that the website was instead using users’ IP addresses to locate their position.

Original URL: https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/social-media-users-report-bizarre-facebook-glitch/news-story/ccfcb71f236744a5682c8e4f6aad7506