Most Facebook users are accustomed to bizarre strange invites, games and notifications in their Facebook inboxes, but Pablo S. Torre found something completely unexpected in his on Wednesday night: well over 100 private messages not intended for his eyes.
“I literally have people’s private correspondence with their names attached,” Pablo told the Wall Street Journal. “I’m very curious to see how Facebook deals with this.”
Facebook says a glitch related to a software update caused the message system to go haywire Wednesday night for “a short time,” delivering piles of private messages to seemingly random users. Engineers realized the mistake immediately, but apparently not before a torrent of private messages found their way to the wrong recipients.
“During our regular code push earlier yesterday evening, a bug caused some misrouting to a small number of users for a short period of time,” Facebook said in an e-mail. “Our engineers diagnosed the problem moments after it began and worked diligently to get everything back in its rightful place. While they fixed the issue, affected users were not able to access the site.”
Theoretically, that gave the lucky Facebook users with access to forbidden messages a narrow window to access them, but that hasn’t stopped some from leaking out. Although Facebook claims the number of affected users was miniscule, Wall Street Journal editor Zachary Seward found his own inbox flooded and cataloged some of the messages for your viewing pleasure, minus the names, of course.
Our personal favorite: “I might kill you for this.”
Yikes. Whatever got him so riled up in the first place, hopefully he doesn’t find out Seward republished it online.
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