How often do you block people on Facebook? One recent bug on the social network unblocked people on 800,000 accounts. Although Facebook is aware of the issue and has fixed it, it would be best to see if you’re one of the affected users.
The social media network notified more than 800,000 users “about a bug in Facebook and Messenger that unblocked some people they had blocked” between May 29 and June 5, Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan announced in a blog post. Although blocked users couldn’t access the person’s account fully, they could still see a limited portion of things that were posted by those people to a wider audience. One example is pictures that were shared with “friends of friends.”
Facebook apologized for unblocking people on 800,000 accounts and said that the problem is fixed, so they are again blocked. However, Facebook is going to alert those who were affected and advise them to check their block lists again.
When people are blocked on Facebook, they can no longer see things that are posted by the person who blocked them. They also can’t start a conversation on Facebook’s sibling app Messenger or add that person as a friend. Facebook wrote that 83% of those who were affected by this bug had only one person who was temporarily unblocked. However, that meant they could make contact using the Messenger app during that time.
Egan said the issue is quite serious, as when you block a person, you “may want to take a break from someone [but] other reasons are more serious like harassment or bullying,” she wrote in the blog post. The issue came only one month after Facebook acknowledged a software bug which changed the suggested audience for new posts to “public” in May, according to PC Mag.
Facebook’s audience selector tool can remember the audience that saw shared posts the last time a user posted something, whether it was publicly, friends only, or “only me.” Whenever a user writes a new post, it will suggest the same audience that saw the previous post.
Nevertheless, between May 18 and May 27, about 14 million people published posts publicly, and many of those people were convinced that they were only sharing with their own friends.
Does the issue that Facebook unblocked people on 800,000 accounts sound serious to you? Let us know in the comments.
