Facebook Briefly Killed A Lot Of People This Afternoon

Image courtesy of Gizmodo

Are you okay? For a brief but deeply weird period this afternoon, Facebook killed a substantial part of its user base, telling their friends to “remember” them. These people were, to be clear, mostly alive.

Memorial mode for Facebook accounts exists so that you can preserve a loved one’s posts and photos, but without seeing their faces and names in Facebook ads. You can have someone’s account put in that mode by sending to Facebook something as simple as an online obituary.

14976503_10153804759986403_8495193145876627497_oToday, though, a glitch killed off much of Facebook’s user base for a few minutes, but left the newly deceased logged in.

Naomi, for example, logged in to Facebook on her phone to discover that she was dead, but no one is supposed to be able to log in to a memorialized account.

Fortunately, everything went back to normal within the hour, with the living and the dead having the correct respective Facebook account statuses. There were no lasting effects other than being super weirded out.

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