Mortified Facebook users shut down their accounts after glitch exposes their stalking habits

Facebook users have rushed to deactivate their accounts after an embarrassing glitch revealed who they had been stalking.

Could you just excuse me for a hot second? I just need to remove some emails from my junk mail.

A glitch in the system caused friend requests to automatically be sent to profiles of users you have previously viewed.

So your ex, the friend you haven’t spoken to in years, that girl in your class that became an influencer…yep, no one is safe.

The bug had many leaping to their screens, desperately trying to delete their accounts due to the blunder.

One person on Twitter warned about the dangers of social media sleuthing by posting a short clip of them clicking on a Facebook user's profile with a friend request automatically sent.

“Umm... you might want to avoid clicking on user profiles on Facebook for a bit. it's auto-sending friend requests,” they wrote in the caption.

Another said: “Na deleting Facebook now, only reason I have it is to stalk.”

umm... you might want to avoid clicking on user profiles on Facebook for a bit. it's auto-sending friend requests. pic.twitter.com/ettkXhvXV1

— Oliver Cragg (@olliecapa26) May 12, 2023

A third shared: “Haha my ex from years ago has friended and unfriended me on Facebook because yesterday there was a glitch where if you went on a profile, it automatically sent a request, meaning she must have been Facebook stalking debating whether to say anything now.”

Another commented: “If you get a request from me, I’m not stalking you, deleting Facebook.”

A spokesperson issued a statement to The Daily Beast, revealing that the issue has since been resolved.

“We fixed a bug related to a recent app update that caused some Facebook friend requests to be sent mistakenly,” the spokesperson said.

“We've stopped this from happening and we apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

However, if you’re still paranoid that you’ve been affected by this tech error, head to facebook.com/friends.

From there, click 'Friend Requests' in the left-hand tab, then hit 'View send requests' to see the pending requests.

This comes after the social media giant led by Mark Zuckerberg also suffered a significant glitch in August, leading many users’ feeds to become inundated with content shared on celebrity pages made by complete strangers.

So if you saw heaps of memes about Taylor Swift or The Rock, this is why.

Internet outage tracker Downdetector reported to have received more than 1,400 reports of Facebook problems, with the majority of complaints regarding their feed.