Facebook fixes 'glitch' and explains why bizarre celeb posts flooded newsfeeds

Facebook has fixed its 'glitch' and explained why bizarre celebrity posts flooded users' newsfeeds today (24 August).

Early this morning, thousands of people reported issues with the social media platform after their homepage feeds were crowded by random messages from fans to the pages of major celebs.

Among the most frequent stars were Adam Sandler, Billie Eilish, Snoop Dogg, Harry Styles and Eminem, with some suggesting Facebook either 'glitched' or had been 'hacked'.

A spokesperson for the platform has since said the issue has been resolved and that it was down to a 'configuration change'.

Alexandru Voica, Technology Communications Manager at Meta, said on Twitter: "Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook Feed.

"We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience."

The company gave a similar answer after a social media blackout in October last year which saw apps including Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp go down for a number of hours.

In a statement shared at the time, it said: "Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication.

"This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.

"We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.

"We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime."

Regarding today's glitch, DownDetector, which offers real-time monitoring of outages with popular sites and services, showed that the issue hit its peak at 8.11am with 2,692 reported Facebook issues, as opposed to its baseline of four.

Hundreds of people took to Twitter to discuss the unusual predicament, with one asking: "What's happening in Facebook? Why is my timeline is filled with unnecessary posts tagged to celebs I follow?"

Another said: "I enjoy that when one social media app is in complete disarray, I can jump onto a different one and see the chaos affecting other people in real-time.

"I don't know what's up with Facebook currently, but holy s**t is the timeline feed a disaster right now."

A third added: "Who else came to Twitter to figure out what is happening to #Facebook?"

While a fourth said: "Is anybody else’s Facebook news feed acting weird? I’m trying to scroll through my news feed, and all I’m seeing are people posting to pages of people I’m following like Neymar Jr, Eminem, etc. instead of my friends’ stuff."

A spokesperson for Meta told LADbible earlier today: "Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook Feed.

"We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologise for any inconvenience."