Facebook Bug Unblocks People Who Were Blocked On User Profiles
This is becoming more and more of a case for Facebook being a less-preferred choice of social media.
If you have someone blocked on Facebook, you may have been compromised between the dates May 29 to June 5.
TechCrunch notes in their report that if you blocked someone who was friends with you before, they would have remained not-your-friend, rather than having access to your profile again, but when it comes to someone that has an individual blocked for… say… stalking? That is a big concern.
They share that the user would be able to contact you on messenger or try to re-add you as a friend.
The message that was sent out to users, according to TechCrunch was as follows:
“Important Information About Your Facebook Account
(NAME), we recently found and fixed a technical issue causing some people you blocked to be unblocked for a period of time between May 29 and June 5, including (NAME OF BLOCKED USER). During this time, (gender) may have seen the information you’ve shared, but she couldn’t see things you only shared to your friends.
We’ve fixed the issue and blocked them again. We appolgoize for this mistake. You can go to your blocking settings to check who’s on your blocked list, or visit our safety center.”
Facebook’s Twitter Account (funny, right?) spoke to TechCrunch‘s Josh Constine – and the exchange can be viewed here:
Hey Josh, it’s always hard to find the right level of technical detail to put in a blog post like this. More context on what caused the bug: most visible user data on FB is stored in pairs called “associations,” which control what posts people see and the actions they can take.
— Meta (@Meta) July 2, 2018
A bug mistakenly deleted some of these associations across Facebook and Messenger, which caused blocks to be lost.
— Meta (@Meta) July 2, 2018
