Further to my earlier story about disappearing Facebook accounts, I've had several people emailing me with similar problems. Laura White says she had the same error we heard about earlier: "Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience."
However, three hours later she got an "incorrect email/password combination" error. "There is stuff on there that I really need" she says.
Dan Savage says he accessed Facebook this afternoon to find six of his friends had blank user profiles. "They then didn't appear on my 'friends list' and they didn't appear on any subsequent searches I made...there appeared to be no account for them. Oddly, it looked like they were disappearing as a result of me clicking on them.
Claire Coleman tried to log on this morning and got the maintenance message and, like Laura, she tried later and got the username/password error. Claire also checked her account from a dummy login she had to check her privacy settings previously. "Comments I've left on walls are unattributed and I'm not there in searches. The same seems to be true of at least one other friend of mine."
Like Claire we've emailed Facebook to try and get clarity on the situation.
Dr Mark Jones says he was using Facebook fine this morning then got the username/password error from midday. "More disturbing: half an hour ago, a colleague phoned to tell me that I had 'vanished from facebook', my posts were still there on walls, but with no name attached," he says in his email "I had disappeared from friend lists, discussions, groups, photo tags. I tried the password reset again, but was greeted with a message about invalid account information."
Of course, the biggest problem is the retrieval of the content that is stored on Facebook. If user accounts have disappeared, what does this mean for the photos and friend lists they have accumulated. As Dr Jones suggests, "I will have lost several acquaintances all over the world I've met by chance on Facebook."
"Strange how in this age of facebook stalkers, identify theft and worries about the persistence of information unwisely posted on websites, I've suffered a virtual death." Quite.
Your comments (3) Click to add a new comment
rusty616
August 5th 2009
3. I got the "Email/password message" reset my password, but the profile disappeared on Firefox--it lasted an hour more on Safari access. It subsequently evaporated completely! Emails to Facebook got the reply:" We have no record of any Facebook account registered to that email address." My account was MORE than 5 years old, I sent them copies of emails that friends had sent me in the previous 3 months, but they still found "nothing." What a bunch of jagoffs!
Alert a moderator
thirsty4jesus
January 22nd 2009
2. oh my goodness. this EXACT thing happened to me just this past week. can anyone help?? can the page and information be recovered. i lost new and old friends. what can be done? why is this happening?
Alert a moderator
mozzer69
October 17th 2008
1. I have been accessing facebook this week after a gap of 2 to 3 months. My friends have gone from 85 to literally zero in this last week even though i have not fallen out in reality with any of these people some of which I have known for twenty years. Plus, we have been adding each other all over again, to no avail, even though my hotmail in box is full of people confirming me as a friend, even just today, they have all disappeared from my list of friends. Can anybody shed any light on this because this is obviously the extreme case? Certainly I have not heard of this before. Frankly its bizarre, and what is the best way to contact facebook apart from using the help facility. I have used that and no one gets back to me. Am I virtually dead??
Alert a moderator
Tell us what you think
You need to Log in or register to post comments