Facebook is killing people, posting erroneous “Memorialized Account” messages

Facebook may be telling you you’re dead today. It appears to be a bug that’s hitting many accounts, one that we’ve seen first hand.

Below is an example of what I saw when I went to Facebook just a few minutes ago:

As the top, you can see that it says “Remembering Danny Sullivan,” something that only shows for memorialized accounts. These are accounts that have been preserved on Facebook only after a family member or friend puts in a request that’s been approved.

In other words, Facebook thinks I’m dead. And reports from Twitter are that it thinks many other people are dead. Here are just three of many examples:

The messages seem to have appeared not just for the account holders but for people who go to their pages. That means people might mistakenly learn from Facebook that someone has died. This includes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

However, the bug does not appear to be passing such an alarming message through Facebook’s news feed stream.

The deatheating on Facebook also appears to have been short-lived. Soon after this story was posted, I was back to life, and others reported the same.

We’re checking with Facebook for what’s happening, if anyone is still alive there, and will update as we learn more.

Postscript. Facebook sent this 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.

About The Author

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan is a Founding Editor of Marketing Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Marketing Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.