Facebook Duplicate Posts (i_04_1471)

Incident Overview

As described in the incident timeline below, on May 9, 2019, we witnessed a large number of what appeared to be duplicate Facebook posts. The duplicates were not visible from Facebook’s user interfaces but were being returned by their Graph API (Application Programming Interface). The duplicated post content matches the original exactly, but post IDs, authors, timeline visibility settings, and engagement tracking appear different. The cause of the duplication was determined to be a bug in Facebook’s API.

Facebook posts affected by this bug will be tagged with “i_04_1471.” These posts are not computed as a part of customer record counts. The Social Media Archiving (formerly ArchiveSocial) web application will continue to consider these posts deleted, even though they were technically created and deleted by Facebook. To view archives without these duplicate posts, users can filter on the incident tag: “i_04_1471.”

Incident Timeline

• [Update] October 30, 2019, 11:47 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time (EST))
  • The Social Media Archiving Development Team completes processing all historical posts affected by the incident, adding the appropriate tag (“i_04_1471”). 908,178 entries were tagged out of 22,866,522 total Facebook_Page entries.
• [Update] October 17, 2019, 3:26 p.m. (EST)
  • No new information from Facebook concerning a fix for the bug. Our Development Team deploys a long-term fix. Suspicious posts in the future will be tagged through our new incident-handling process.
• [Update] May 15, 2019, 5:55 a.m. (EST)
  • Facebook accepts the bug and assigns it to its engineering team for investigation.
• [Update] May 9, 2019, 4:47 p.m. (EST)
  • The Social Media Archiving Development Team logs a formal bug through Facebook’s developer support channel.
• [Start] May 9, 2019, 3:10 p.m. (EST)
  • The Social Media Archiving Team identifies an issue with Facebook’s Graph API returning what appear to be duplicate posts.