When things go wrong on Facebook, they go disastrously wrong. But one Facebook engineer faced the Web's wrath head on and mitigated a public relations disaster for the world's largest social network.
Late Monday, a Facebook engineer took to Reddit to apologise for inadvertently blocking Imgur, one of the most popular image sharing sites on the Web, from the social network.
Users were prevented from posting any Imgur links to their profile pages and timelines on Monday, and were greeted by a Facebook error message telling them the links were being "blocked for being spammy or unsafe."
The false positive may have gone unnoticed by Facebook's estimated 950 million users late on Monday night, but the block was enough to provoke a backlash from users of Reddit, the hugely popular community site.
Imgur saw close to 30 billion pageviews over the last 30 days on more than 17.3 million uploaded images. Reddit meanwhile said in a blog post in January that it had racked up more than 2 billion pageviews over the preceding December and had nearly 35 million unique visitors during the month.
Within a couple of hours after a picture of the Facebook error message was posted on Reddit, the image rocketed to the top spot on its homepage, attracting more than 800 comments.
(Credit: Screenshot by Zack Whittaker/CNET; Source: Facebook)
The Facebook engineer behind the block took to Reddit, apologising on the thread for what happened. "This is actually my fault," he wrote.
(Credit: Screenshot by Zack Whittaker/CNET; Source: Reddit)
The problem occurred after the system Facebook uses to catch malicious and spammy links ran into a bug following a "bad URL that our automated defenses didn't catch," the engineer said, leaving Imgur blocked for a short, but unspecified, amount of time.
The engineer sought to fix the problem immediately, and followed his apology by uploading a picture of his 'patriotic dog' to Imgur.
The engineer's post went some way to mitigating the faux pas in the eyes of Reddit readers: the apology comment is the most upvoted comment on the thread.
Facebook did not respond for comment at the time of writing. However, the comment's author shares the Twitter handle as @fisherrider, which points to Matt Jones, a software engineer at Facebook working on the Site Integrity team. Jones subsequently tweeted a link to the Reddit comment he left: "Well, I guess that turned out OK after all."
No comments:
Post a Comment