Outrage as Facebook bug deletes MILLIONS of social network posts
FACEBOOK has suffered a colossal security bug which has deleted MILLIONS of posts.
Facebook has come under fire after a malfunction deleted MILLIONS of social media posts
The hugely successful social network began randomly deleting posts and links last night.
Angry users flooded Twitter to complain about the Facebook bug.
The mass deletion took place after a number of legitimate URLs were incorrectly flagged as "malicious or inappropriate" - and automatically deleted by Facebook.
Facebook deleting status about Freddie Gray is absolutely ludicrous
Outraged users initially claimed the social network was censoring content around the Baltimore riots.
"Facebook deleting status about Freddie Gray is absolutely ludicrous," one Twitter user wrote.
"Let people speak!"
The Facebook bug, which first appeared yesterday evening, was system-wide and affected millions of posts.
Facebook deleting status about Freddie Gray is absolutely ludicrous. Let people speak! #FreddieGray
— Benjamin Homola (@Littlefooted) April 30, 2015
Facebook has since fixed the problem.
A spokesperson for the Californian firm said: "An error in our system that helps block bad links on Facebook incorrectly marked some URLs as malicious or inappropriate.
"As a result, some existing posts were hidden, while other posts were blocked completely.
“We’ve resolved the issue and the remaining affected URLs are being unblocked.
"We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused."
Earlier this year, Facebook went down for more than four hours.
The outage was widely reported as a hack - however Facebook has since blamed the issue on "a change that affected our configuration systems".