On Friday afternoon, Facebook randomly began mourning the passing of many of its users who were still alive. A number of people claimed they logged in to the service to find a status atop of their Facebook profile indicating they passed away.
Strangely, only people who were believed to be deceased could see the notification on other users’ profiles. It was like Facebook was amassing some sort of digital army of the dead, with Mark Zuckerberg as its supreme leader. Yes, as it turns out, the Facebook founder’s account was also affected by the error.
https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/797179600073801729
Perhaps we all died and only Facebook knows about it? Isn’t everyone good as dead if Facebook says so? Jokes aside, the error caused much concern for users who may have seen the status above a friend or loved one’s profile.
Accompanied with one solitary blue flower, the message read: “We hope people who love [insert name] will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate [his or her] life.” It goes on to provide links to the memorialized accounts support page and management settings that can see to it that someone takes over your account — which we’re sure would be helpful in the event someone really did pass away, but that wasn’t the case.
Facebook tells Digital Trends the issue has been fixed. A spokesperson for the company emailed over the following statement: “For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialized profiles was mistakenly posted to other accounts. This was a terrible error that we have now fixed. We are very sorry that this happened and we worked as quickly as possible to fix it.”
Many people — who were at least alive enough to type out a tweet — have poked fun at the Facebook error on Twitter. One user claimed it may have occurred as a result of all the messages she was receiving on Friday. However, Facebook has not confirmed what caused the error.
https://twitter.com/passantino/status/797177670232485888
in other news, Facebook's algorithm thinks that i ****died**** based on the messages i'm getting #RIPme pic.twitter.com/IfoCDumNCi
— elaine filadelfo (@ElaineF) November 11, 2016
For now, let us all take a moment to be thankful for the fact that we are actually alive and not just living out an afterlife in which the world has gone absolutely mad. If only it were that simple.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?