Ramble On Ron

Diamonds, Music and other Facets of Life

Facebook Bug Had My Page Losing Thousands

Posted on | June 16, 2010 | 4 Comments

Last week, I noticed that my Diamonds Fan Page was losing THOUSANDS of fans a day and hundreds of fans an hour. I was at around 349,000 fans and I saw this number go down by the minute – all the way to 342,000.

Of course, my natural reaction was…PANIC! How could this be? I googled everything I could think of and nothing came up. In my mind, there were a few explanations to this:

DiamondFans.net

DiamondFans.net

1) A certain country banned Facebook and all of those fans (I know they are “likes” now but I still call them fans) are gone.

2) Facebook was clearing out phantom/fraudulent accounts and there just happened to be 7,000 of them on my page.

3) People just don’t like diamonds anymore.

4) Facebook is out to get me. 😉

Well, checking this page every five minutes was driving me nuts so I just accepted it and hoped that it would stabilize. Then, Friday night I did a twitter search (don’t do that enough) and found this article on InsideFacebook.com:

Note: Facebook Working on Fixing Fan Count Bug For Pages

Over the last couple days, some Page administrators have been noticing incorrect counts for the number of people who like their Facebook Page. Facebook has confirmed that this is a bug, and is working to fix it today.

According to a Facebook spokesperson, “There was a bug that caused an accounting error for the number of people who like a Page. We are working hard to fix this bug and restore the counts as quickly as possible. No fans or data was lost, and news feed distribution has not been affected.”

We’ll let you know as Facebook makes progress on fixing the issue.

Phew, that was a close one!

Then I found this post the next day on AllFacebook.com:

Facebook Bug Results in Decreasing Fan Counts

Over the past few days many Facebook Page administrators have noticed their fan counts decreasing. If you’ve seen this happen, you are not alone. We’ve reached out to Facebook but haven’t received a response on the issue, which means there is probably a bug which needs to be fixed. Unfortunately there hasn’t been any clarifications from Facebook, but don’t worry as many other people have noticed similar issues.

Logically, it didn’t make sense, and I needed to go with my gut and realize that Facebook can make mistakes. They do have 500 million users and an unbelievable amount of content and data.

So now we’re back up to speed and moving forward on making DiamondFans bigger and better. And I will not let Facebook glitches take me off my game anymore!

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