Facebook explains why news feed turned to chaos: ‘configuration change’

Facebook says it has fixed a problem that suddenly turned users’ news feeds into chaos – and attempted to explain why it happened.

On Wednesday morning, users found their news feed flooded with comments on celebrities’ pages, rather than the usual posts from friends or other pages they were interested in.

All a person would have to do to have a post pushed to everybody who follows Lady Gaga’s page, for instance, was to comment on that page.

The problem meant that the news feed quickly became chaotic, as people attempted to capitalise on their unexpected appearance in people’s feeds by posting memes or pushing their own personal projects.

And the site became largely unusable for its normal function of seeing updates from friends or interesting pages.

The issue was the result of a “configuration change” that has since been fixed, Facebook has now said.

Facebook has used the same vague explanation in the past. It used the same phrase in October 2021, when a huge outage took the site down for around seven hours, and has used it multiple times besides.

The company rarely gives detailed information about its outages, even long after the problems have been resolved.

Before it was fixed, thousands of people reported the issue, which began early on Wednesday morning UK time. By lunchtime, ti appeared to have been resolved.

During the outage, Facebook released a statement saying it was “aware” of the problem. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience,” a spokesperson said.