Was your Facebook feed flooded with celebrity spam today? Mine too
When I checked Facebook this morning, I was greeted by loads of posts to WandaVision star Elizabeth Olsen. I don’t follow Elizabeth Olsen on Facebook and, for the most part, I have no interest in what other people are saying to her on the social network (I expect she is similarly disinterested in the messages she gets via the platform, if the sample I saw is anything to go by).
I knew I hadn’t been hacked, but it was still a very weird sight. I wasn’t alone here, as my colleague Sofia reported the same issue. It turns out, this was a problem affecting a huge number of users which saw celebrity fan pages and groups being boosted to the top of Home feeds around the world.
Quite a few users managed to take advantage of the strange glitch by promoting personal fundraisers across celebrity pages on Facebook, knowing they would be visible to a much larger-than-usual audience.
Facebook's parent Meta acknowledged that there was a problem, apologized for any inconvenience, and said it was working to address the issue.
According to Downdetector, the peak of the outage happened between the hours of 7am and 9am BST. Things seems to have mostly returned to normal now.
This odd problem only affected the Home section of Facebook.
Update: A Meta spokesperson tell us: "Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook Feed. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."