Early this morning many Facebook pages were redirected to the Co-Founder of Facebook Chris Hughes. Many personal and business profiles and pages containing digits are not able to be accessed.
What’s Happened?
Many people woke up this morning to find that they could no longer access their Facebook personal and business profiles or pages. First thoughts from concerned Facebook users was that their pages had been hacked and stolen. People are confused and wondering why their pages have been redirected to someone else's page.
The Issue…
Chris Hughes is the Co-Founder of Facebook and has recently published a book; some people believe that having their pages redirected is a PR stunt designed to get his book some publicity.
It is our understanding that after a change was made to the Facebook infrastructure an issue has been introduced that is causing pages containing a '5' or '4' to be redirected to the Co-Founders Chris Hughes and Mark Zuckerberg. Other digits sending users elsewhere is unknown.
Why does this happen?
A feature of Facebook is that you can visit the Facebook URL followed by a slash '/' and your user 'Identification Number'. 4 is the ID for Mark Zuckerberg and 5 is the ID for Chris Hughes. It appears that when Facebook is trying to decide where to send you based on the URL, it is getting lost and sending you to the page of the person whose ID is contained in the URL. How can you fix your page? For the time being, the only way to fix your Facebook link is to remove numbers from your custom URL, therefore the system won’t get confused and send you to the wrong page. A further fix is expected to come from Facebook to rectify the issue.
The Fallback…
Most businesses use Facebook to promote their business, however, with this move/bug it makes us wonder whether Facebook has the power and facilities to remove social following and redirect your page anywhere, anytime, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it!
What have people said?
Here are some messages from Facebook users and businesses who have had their pages taken away from them and made inaccessible:
Rober Shiatsu – Good morning...am trying to connect with my work page and instead is your profile what I get...is this a joke?
Alice Gayet – We run an event page! it was working yesterday and today it redirects me to this profile page
Gabi Nist – Please report this profile, I have the same problem
Johan Kilicoglu – Our page is 5spades.com and our company name is the same name.. How will we fix this?
Szalai Nori – All my fanpages (with nearly 300.000 fans) have disappeared ...
Sandi Legro – when I click on my own name to go to my profile your page comes up instead.. any idea why?
David Gilmore – 5th Element NI our charity page is getting redirected to here also??? Sort it out please!
Rober Shiatsu – when this did happened? mine was working just fine yesterday
Luca Brochero – am trying to connect with my work page and instead is your profile. why ? what happen for my page ?
Elisabetta Villa – Hi Chris something strange is occurring on our page on FB. From desktop we are no more able to access to our page and we are redirect to your profile. Our page is can you help us?
