Facebook has announced today that more than 800,000 users were affected by a bug that unblocked some of the people that they blocked on the world’s largest social network. The company mentions that the bug didn’t reinstate any friend connections that were broken once the account in question was blocked, but it did present the blocked person with the opportunity to message the user who blocked them. Blocking someone on Facebook automatically unfriends them.
Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan adds that the bug was active between May 29th and June 5th and that while someone who was unblocked by this bug couldn’t see the content the user shared with friends, they could have seen things posted to a wider audience such as pictures shared with friends of friends. Facebook has apologized for the matter.
Egan also added that 83 percent of the people affected by the bug had only one person they had blocked being temporarily unblocked. The bug has now been addressed and all of the people that those 800,000+ users had blocked have been blocked once again. Those who were affected by this issue will receive a notification on Facebook encouraging them to check their blocked list to ensure that everything is as it should be.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook. Source: newsroom.fb