Facebook Acknowledges Error That Locked Some Users Out of Their Accounts
On Friday and Saturday, Facebook users across the globe were locked out of their accounts due to a system error. This was raised as a security threat among the affected users. On the other hand, the social networking giant was fast to declare its users that there was no security problem and the error was a result of a technical glitch.
"An error in one of our systems designed to help prevent suspicious account access sent a small set of people to our account recovery flow unnecessarily," Mashable quoted a Facebook spokesperson as saying. "We have fixed the issue and are in the process of clearing the affected accounts from this recovery flow," the spokesperson added.
However, it could not be confirmed how many accounts were affected due to the snag on Friday. Facebook also explained to the publication that the error was not due to the Cloud flare leak that was newly repaired by the content delivery network and Internet security services provider. Unofficially christened Cloudbleed, the bug was similar to Heartbleed in that it leaked user data.
Particularly, users of various Google services were affected by a Google Accounts engine issue and were also locked out earlier this week.Separately, Facebook declared on Saturday it has recorded 300 billion Reactions on posts and the Love reaction was used maximum times by its over 1.79 billion users.
On February 24 last year, Facebook improved chats by applying Reactions - a group of emojis that has Love, Wow, Haha, Sad and Angry emoticons - that linked the famous like button.
According to an outage detecting website, DownDetector, the problem is presently being faced by users located in Europe, Brazil, United States (East and West coast), and some areas in Australia.
Users who are locked out of their Facebook accounts can follow the Facebook reminders and reset their password. Though, if their request is failed, there's no other alternative but to wait till the problem is fixed.In another statement, Facebook shown that it has recorded 300 billion Reactions on posts and the Love reaction was used maximum times by its over 1.79 billion users.
"It's been one year since we could do more than 'Like' a friend's post, and in that time, there have been a total of 300 billion reactions on posts to date," Facebook said in a statement (via News18). "We have also analyzed and are now able to share the most commonly used reactions and the times/places they are used most, providing insight about how Facebook's more than 1.8 billion users express themselves on Facebook and beyond," it added.