Facebook reveals cause of bizarre celebrity spam glitch

Facebook experienced an odd glitch Wednesday morning that caused some users to see an abnormally large number of celebrity-related posts in their content feeds.

Screenshots circulating on Twitter indicated that affected users’ feeds were bombarded with posts replying to celebrity fan pages and other accounts related to public figures. The posts ranged from text replies to photos and weird memes.

DownDetector, a website that tracks site outages, noted a spike of users reporting issues with Facebook in the early morning hours Wednesday. Many of the complaints referenced problems with Facebook’s feed and “celebrity posts.”

“Is anyone else’s facebook feed completely cooked right now and just showing loads of spam comments posted on facebook pages?” one Facebook user wrote on Twitter alongside a screenshot of a post.

“Why is my facebook timeline full of people posting on celebrity pages timelines? I’m about to delete fb cause hell no,” another tweeted.

Facebook acknowledged issues with user feeds and began troubleshooting efforts shortly after the reports surfaced. In an update later in the morning, the social media site said an internal change had caused the bizarre behavior.

“Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook Feed,” a Meta spokesperson said in statement. “We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

The nature of the change that caused the issue was not immediately clear. The Post has followed up with Meta for further comment.

The celebrity spam glitch was the most significant issue impacting Facebook’s main platform since last October, when a lengthy outage impacted Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger for several hours.

At the time, the company described the outage as an “error of our own making” that occurred during routine maintenance.

The Post has reached out to Facebook for further comment