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.
A Facebook engineer took to Reddit
late Monday to apologize 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, noted in a blog post in January that its own site
had racked up more than 2 billion pageviews in 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.
The
Facebook engineer behind the block took to Reddit, apologizing on the thread
for what happened. "This is actually my fault," he wrote.
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 to a request for more
information at the time of writing. However, the Reddit comment's author shared
the Twitter handle @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: "Well, I guess that
turned out OK after all."
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