A Facebook bug killed off people before they were dead
The social media death and resurrection show.
Well, this is awkward. Facebook incorrectly flagged some people's profile pages with a message saying that the person was deceased. And it looks like the glitch was pretty widespread: even founder Mark Zuckerberg had apparently ceased to be. A banner at the top of his profile page read, "We hope people who love Mark will find comfort in the thing others share to remember and celebrate his life." A number of Engadget staffers had passed on as well; we weren't just pining.
But it seemed to be on whoever was viewing the page, and not individual accounts -- a few of us didn't see any issues when scrolling through the social network's pages. We've reached out to Facebook for more information and will update this post should it arrive.
Update: Now that things have calmed down, a Facebook spokesperson has provided Engadget 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."
