Issues with Facebook

Josef from Waikanae

I've experienced anomalies with facebook's service that would be pretty distressing to many in a self-isolation context. I have no gauge on how common or widespread these issues are, but I imagine my SO and I can't be alone in experiencing them—who else has these issues?

- Content disappearing. When looking back through my updates from 2017 and earlier, I notice the content and comments have been removed, but the Likes remain. Not swathes of them, but seemingly at random. I've also never seen them resurface as "memories", as is meant to happen when a post reaches an anniversary.

- No notifications. I know we are all aware of how facebook picks and chooses what we see from pages and groups. But something seems very off when you see nothing for friends for whom you've enabled notifications, even those in your Close Friends list, and they have posted several times throughout the day.

- Friends disappearing without warning. Friends who would never want to lose that connection, that don't deactivate their accounts, and yet vanish from your friends with no record of the action. As if it thinks that if you don't notice, you must not care.

- Slow messages. Really, really slow. One would hope even if everything else was terrible that you could still rely on the messenger. Yet messages are delayed for hours, regularly. Even adjusting for timezone, screenshots of the same conversation will show them being sent and received hours apart—17 hours in one case. You can only wonder how!? Where else did the message go?

These problems have made Facebook so unreliable that it seems almost useless at its core now compared to other platforms... and to be honest it feels like we're being experimented on. But I also wonder if it has caused grief or misunderstanding during lockdown, where old friends have been making time to reconnect.