Users theme has been severely disrupted for several hours

Facebook’s work was seriously disrupted, Wednesday, August 24, due to a glitch that affected many Internet users around the world. The news feed of users of the social network, for several hours, was invaded by messages in all languages, often abbreviated, from unknown people.

The main common denominator of these messages appears to be that they were directed to celebrity accounts; They mainly appeared on the feeds of people who follow these characters on Facebook, which created quite a bit of chaos. This issue appears to be unique to Facebook; Instagram, also owned by Meta, was not affected.

At the end of the morning, Facebook explained to Globalism One “Changing the configuration caused a glitch in the news feed for some users. The issue was resolved ASAP, and we are sorry for the inconvenience.” the scientist Already saw a return to normal.

All of these disruptions appeared as a glitch affecting the social network’s newsfeed rating system. For ten years, Facebook has used an algorithm that assigns a “ranking” to every content posted on the platform, choosing what appears in the news feed based on their supposed interests and the interests of each user. One possible factor is that this error has greatly increased the importance of “categorizing” messages addressed to public figures.

Throughout the morning, netizens have taken advantage of the phenomenon to widely spread memes and sarcastic messages mocking Facebook by sending their messages to celebrity pages to ensure wide distribution.

Very complex ranking algorithms

The process of Facebook’s content ranking algorithms, which have evolved over time to include hundreds of parameters, is particularly complex. Internal Facebook documents announced at the end of 2021 by Frances Hogan, a former employee of the social network who became a whistleblower and denounced “drifts” in the company’s work, showed that sometimes harmless modifications to Facebook tools can be unpredictable. And dire consequences.

“The different parts of the Facebook apps interact with each other in complex ways.” And each team develops modifications without being there A unified methodological visionFor example, in one of the published documents, an employee of the company. with result “The increased risk of problems being facilitated or amplified by unexpected interactions between platform functions or services.”