This article was published on November 11, 2016

Strange Facebook bug shows certain users as dead — including Mark Zuckerberg [Updated]


Strange Facebook bug shows certain users as dead — including Mark Zuckerberg [Updated]

A strange Facebook bug spotted by Business Insider shows a memorial message sitting atop profiles that informs friends and families a user has died. The message reads:

We hope people who love [User] will find comfort in the things other share to remember and celebrate his life.

The message also includes a link to a Facebook form to set up an account for a deceased person as a memorial account.

zuck
Credit: Business Insider

It’s not affecting everyone, so it’s unclear at this time how widespread the bug is, or what’s causing it. Business Insider reports it has seen the message on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s account, but we haven’t been able to spot it ourselves. In fact, we haven’t spotted it at all — so it seems to be a problem that’s not affecting the platform globally.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification.

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[Update] A Facebook representative responded with the following:

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.

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