On August 24, several users' news feeds were, over a period of several hours, overrun with messages that were not sought by them.
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On Wednesday, August 24, a bug that impacted a significant number of Internet users in a variety of locations caused a significant disruption to the functioning of Facebook. Messages written in a variety of languages and often consisting of just a few words were posted on the news feeds of members of the social networking site for many hours.
The fact that these comments looked to be directed at celebrity accounts was the most obvious similarity between them; these messages mostly appeared on the feeds of those who follow these personalities on Facebook, causing some level of confusion. It seems that Facebook was the only platform impacted by the problem; Meta, which also owns Instagram, remained unscathed.
At the end of the morning, Facebook stated to Le Monde that a "configuration update created functioning issues on the news feeds of some users." Le Monde was one of the publications that received the explanation. The problem was fixed as fast as humanly feasible, and we apologize for any trouble this may have caused. The status quo has, in all actuality, been restored around the globe.
These disruptions gave off all the appearances of being caused by a bug that was impacting the categorization mechanism of the messages in the news feed of the social network. Facebook has utilized an algorithm for the past ten years that assigns a "rating" to each piece of content that is published on the platform. This algorithm then selects what appears in the News Feed based on the presumed interest of both Facebook as a whole and the interests of each individual user. The fact that the "rating" of communications sent to prominent people was artificially inflated as a result of this problem might provide some useful information.
Internet users took advantage of the occurrence throughout the morning to spread memes and satirical messages ridiculing Facebook. They did this by submitting their messages to celebrity sites, which ensured that their messages would be seen by a large number of people.
Ultra-complex ranking algorithms
The functioning of Facebook's content ranking algorithms, which have developed over time to encompass hundreds of characteristics, is especially complicated due to the fact that they are always being updated. Internal Facebook documents that were made public at the end of 2021 by Frances Haugen, a former employee of the social network who became a whistleblower and who denounced "drifts" in the operation of the company, showed that seemingly innocuous changes to Facebook's tools could have unanticipated and significant repercussions. Haugen was a former employee of Facebook who became a whistleblower and who denounced "drifts" in the operation of the company.
"The many components of Facebook's programs interact with one another in a convoluted manner," and "each team produces updates without there being a cohesive systemic vision," as one employee of the firm remarked, for example, in one of the papers that were made public. Because of this, there is "an elevated chance of issues that are aided or magnified by unplanned interactions between activities or services of the platform," as the result.