Relax, Your Friends Aren’t Dead — It Was Just A Facebook Glitch

In response to a request for comment, a Facebook spokesperson said, “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.”

This article was originally published on November 11, 2016, at 4:20 p.m.

This week has felt like a mournful one to me. But, nevertheless, I was surprised this afternoon when I logged on to Facebook to find a memorial message at the top of my profile page indicating that I had died. And worse, all my friends had apparently died, too. In what appears to have been a glitch of the darkest kind, for a brief period of time this afternoon, Facebook was showing some people that they have passed away (not everyone in our office was experiencing the glitch). When I went to my profile and those of my friends, I saw a bar along the top of the profile with a blue flower and the words "Remembering Maddy Buxton." There were links to Facebook's Memorialization Request page as well as the settings for a "legacy contact" who can maintain control of the page after someone has died.

Was this Facebook's ominous way of referencing how I (and many of my pro-Hillary Facebook friends) felt post-election? I highly doubt it. But after this week, it feels oddly fitting.