Facebook’s Memorial Glitch Told Me I Was Dead
On Friday, I died.
At least according to Facebook. At first, I thought it was because of the last blog I’d written (I take it back! I take it back!), but I quickly realized that, nope, this was just a glitch.
Thanks to a bug in the system, 1.7 billion Facebook users received the option to memorialize their profiles, including Mark Zuckerburg himself.
Facebook quickly recognized its error and sent out 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.
Fortunately for Facebook, most people took the error in stride, making jokes about how good they looked for a dead person or blaming the recent election stress for their untimely exit.
Regardless, outside of the initial existential panic, Facebook removed the feature and had the matter cleared up in a matter of minutes. Users like myself received a thoughtful apology notification directly to our newsfeeds over the weekend.
