For a few days Facebook has been closing thousands of real accounts because of a bug. Find out what’s happening
A very strange thing is happening on Facebook in recent weeks: if you report a fake account, you risk losing yours. It has already happened to thousands of users, who for several days couldn’t access their personal profile.
The serious thing is that, since they no longer have a private profile, these users can’t even access the Facebook and Instagram pages they administer. And this can cause big money losses for those who use these two digital tools in their online business. Facebook, at the moment, does not seem to have fixed the problem (some users have been able to access their profile again, others have not) nor has it issued any statement on the matter or answered specific questions sent via email. It is not known, therefore, when the users banned by mistake will be able to access their profile and their pages again.
Everything starts from a report
The funny thing, but also irritating, is that everything starts from a report, by a legitimate Facebook user, against an account that is not legitimate: a fake or someone who has stolen the digital identity of someone else. Instead of asking for identification from the person who created the fake profile, impersonating another person, Facebook asks for it from the person who made the report. But after taking a picture of the ID and sending it through the appropriate interface, the user often doesn’t solve the problem: the app runs idle for several seconds before returning exactly to the starting point.
A widespread problem
It’s no use trying over and over again to redo the ID process: Facebook won’t unlock the legitimate profile of many users. Many of them have flocked to Twitter, where the hashtag #FacebookLockout is blowing up. Despite having received more than one request for an explanation from several American online publications, including The Next Web, Facebook is currently not responding.
But that’s not all: not being able to access their profile, many users can’t even visit the online technical support pages where they explain how to solve such problems. Finally, if this is not resolved soon, we can expect that reports of fake profiles on Facebook will plummet within a few days. And this is not at all a good thing for the health of the world’s largest social network.