Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Facebook is currently experiencing a bizarre bug that’s filling user feeds with endless posts from celebrity accounts. Multiple Verge staffers who attempted to use the social media network this morning experienced the same issue, where their main News Feed is flooded with minor posts sent to pages for artists like Lady Gaga, Nirvana, and The Beatles.
Users have been quick to take advantage of the bug and are now sending memes to celebrities that they know will be shared far and wide. One widely shared image I’m seeing on my own feed features a picture of a turkey sandwich with the caption, “If you see this share it to another celebrities Facebook page keep the turkey sandwich moving.” It seems everyone that follows that celebrity will then see the image in their feed.
Screenshot: Facebook.com
A sample feed showing the spam and memes that Facebook users are sending to celebrities [with usernames redacted].
Other users are taking advantage of the situation by spamming PayPal donation links or promoting cryptocurrency projects.
Although it doesn’t appear to be an outage in the traditional sense, users have taken to Downdetector to report the problems starting at just before 2:00AM ET. A status dashboard for Meta is reporting no issues as of this writing. A representative from Meta did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Developing…