Mark Zuckerberg and his social media empire Facebook can’t seem to catch a break. At first, the company was just exposing users’ data, but now they seem to be deleting it. A new bug is causing some users problems while adding their live videos to their Story and News Feed after the broadcast has been finished. Facebook seems to be deleting a lot of users’ videos.
Facebook hasn’t revealed how many users have been affected, but it does seem to have been going on for some time now. Obviously, friends who couldn’t catch the live stream won’t be able to view it later since the video got deleted.
Facebook has revealed that the bug was was chronic and it only affected a minority of all users. The social media network has since restored some of the videos but some users got their live videos permanently deleted, so Facebook had to issue a warning to them.
This latest Facebook blunder raises questions if it is even a company worth sharing our personal and private moments too. Facebook has made a lot of unforgivable blunders over the past few years.
With the recent security breach that let hackers gain access to 50 million Facebook accounts, fiddling with users’ biodata, changing default security settings without informing users, and now this latest calamity, people are fed up with the service.
The apology notification reads as follows: “Information about Your Live Videos: Due to a technical issue, one or more of your live videos may have been deleted from your timeline and couldn’t be restored. We understand how important your live videos can be and apologize that this happened.”
Facebook confirmed the error and provided the following statement, “We recently discovered a technical issue that removed live videos from some people’s Facebook Timelines.”
It further added:
” We have resolved this issue and restored many of these videos to people’s Timelines. People whose videos we were unable to restore will get a notification on Facebook. We know saving memories on Facebook is important to people, and we apologize for this error.”
The Silicon Valley behemoth made a huge splurge to advertise its live feature. It bought massive billboard signs, and TV ads and many more media spots to introduce this platform to the world. Their biggest competition at that time was Twitter’s Periscope, which gradually faded out of people’s minds.
Facebook dominated this market as well, with 1 out 5 videos being live. The company in its greed focused on quantity instead of quality. It didn’t put in safety measurements neither tightened the privacy rules.
Facebook’s live broadcast platform has seen some really unpleasant moments throughout its history, one of the most controversial being a live broadcast of a murder. Other similar profoundly disturbing videos have been broadcasted as well, including suicides and robberies etc.
Only celebs, sports athletes, and other notable figures use Facebook live to interact with their fans these days. Having been a Facebook user myself, it’s quite rare to see one of my friends use the service.
Let’s see what measure the company puts in to prevent such catastrophes in the future.
Muhammad Abdullah
Fazeel Ashraf
Jazib Zaman
Amnah Fawad
Hafsa Akbar Ali