The outage that affected both Facebook and Instagram during March 2019 has caused an old hoax to resurface claiming that Facebook has become overpopulated and to keep your account active you need to copy a message to your friends.
Often when services suffer outages or become unavailable, they add a modicum of legitimacy to these silly hoaxes, as witnessed by the recent Facebook outage causing the below hoax to spread virally across the social network…
This message is to inform all our users, that our servers have been very busy lately, so we ask you to help you solve this problem. We ask active users to forward this message to everyone in your contact list to confirm active Facebook users if you do not send this message to all of your Facebook contacts, and your account will remain inactive with the result of losing all your cont Move this message. Your smartphone will be updated within the next 24 hours, and will have a new design and a new color for chat. Dear Facebook users, we will update to Facebook from 23:00 pm. Until 5:00 am on this day. If you do not send this to all your contacts the update will be canceled and you will not have the possibility to chat with your Facebook messages
The claim that you need to forward a message to your contacts to keep an account active is a hoax that dates back to the 1990s when it spread through chain email. Shortly after is targeted users of services like Hotmail/MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. We have previously discussed many other incarnations of this hoax here.
And then of course it has been plaguing Facebook almost since its inception, and occasionally resurfaces from time to time.
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The claim that a service like Facebook needs to rely on users passing a message from one to another to determine who is active on their platform is simply nonsensical. Facebook – a service that’s business model is to learn as much about their users as possible to expose them to targeted advertising – have countless methods to determine exactly – and we mean exactly – how active we are when using their service.
They really do not have to rely on us passing on a message to determine how or when we use their services.
During March 2019, many of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s features became unavailable to users around the globe in what is dubbed the social networks most severe outage since it began, with many reporting that they could no longer make posts or refresh their feeds. At the time of writing no explanation as been offered as to what caused the outage.
Whatever the reason, you can rest assured that the message quoted above is pure nonsense.