Facebook is freaking people out by resharing old posts and photos

Across major social media networks, Thursdays have become the conventional and official day for anyone to do a throwback but Facebook is not ready to play by the rules and they were determined to give usall an early Christmas present by just doing a throwback for us. They introduced a new feature for their users where they took all of the pictures and moments for a certain period and used it to create a short presentation tagged ‘Year-in-Review’. While this is nothing short of a sweet gesture from a platform that has gone to lengths like this to show that it cares for its own users, they might have introduced a big into their system by so doing. With what people are saying, saying five hundred Hail Marys wouldn’t be enough penance for them.
Users were, last week, amazed to enter their timeline and start seeing a lot of posts which they thought were gone for years start to pop up on their timeline again. All those skeletons that they had in their blue cupboards started to crawl out by itself and the zombie posts wouldn’t stay relegated to the past but found a way to surface again. There were a lot of funny conversations, weird posts, and some updates that even the author would have forgotten about on timeline again, and after a while, I was even confused as to the person that I wished a happy birthday, given that it had been a while since I last did that openly on the Facebook forums. In a nutshell, we started to see our old posts on Facebook again and instead of us to be very happy about it, a lot of us threw tantrums, and that’s because we didn’t post them…at least, not then.
The widespread panic that people are having now can be understood, and if you have also been an active user on any social media platform for some years, there is the chance that you also have some dark posts that you would rather stay in the background and not come to life at all. It could be something you sent to the timeline when you were “at the moment’, “on the spot”, in a state of drunkenness or any other condition that might have warranted you to post that then and coming back to haunt you, years after that has gone down, is like opening a fresh can of worms labelled “adult regrets’. What’s even more disconcerting is the fact that these old posts come back as new and for photos, all the tags that were initially used comes back to life again, tagging friends and deleting any associated comments to make it look fresh.
For those that are not concerned about the kind of posts that are being brought on, another category of people who are panicky because they think this might be some attack on the database of Facebook and the fear of losing personal information and user data reigns supreme in their hearts. The Facebook community support is already filled with a lot of open tickets as regards this issue and a lot of users have changed their passwords already, just to be safe. If the month was April, we could have said Facebook is trying to earn the award of the best fool’s day prank of the year but being the end of the year, and it would be a costly one if this is a joke from the management of the giant social media company.
Another theory that people have suggested asides from the glitch being a fault of the year-in-review feature is that the bug is somehow embedded in the new update for the iOS application as it was after the update that many users started to face their issues. Coming at the same time, there is no one feature that can be isolated as the culprit in this delicate solution and we would have to wait till the official statement comes from Facebook itself. As stated above, there is still a community of users that are adamant on a security breach being the cause of this error. Should the latter be the case, Christmas just came early for Facebook, and they would be finding a lot of lawsuits under the tree this holiday period.
This glitch would come in second to one which coursed through the social media app sometimes ago too, causing the platform to pronounce some users dead and then redirecting their family and friends to their page to offer condolences and write nice things about them. This one also caused a lot of discontent with the users and interesting enough, and even Mark Zuckerberg was not spared from this bug.
Up until now, the company is yet to issue any official statement on what is happening or when thy would fix it, but if it is any consolation at all, they have already confirmed to PCMag that they are aware of the problem and are doing everything in their power to rectify the issue. Unfortunately, we can’t do anything about it till they figure out a way around it themselves and solve the problem that is causing a lot of rampage on their platforms. Also, we would like to see better security and bug control on the website in the future. Who knows what the next glitch might reveal?