In case you’ve noticed more notifications from Facebook in the past 24 hours, it’s probably not because you’ve suddenly become more popular. It looks like Facebook’s email notification problem is getting worse.
Facebook lets members turn email notifications on or off for more than 30 different actions on the site. These include anything from when someone sends you a message inside Facebook, invites you to an event, or adds you as friend to when someone tags you in a photo or sends you a poke. Facebook sent out the email below to anyone who is affected:
Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
To reset your email notification settings, go to:
http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications
Thanks,
The Facebook Team
So if you got this e-mail, it means that all of those 30-plus notification settings, including ones for individual apps you’ve installed, are all now set to “On.”
As far as data loss goes, this isn’t that big a deal. The only data that Facebook lost was preference data, not any messages, photos, videos, or the like. But preference data is also important. What if Facebook had lost everyone’s privacy settings instead of just their e-mail notification settings? It would be (slightly) more serious.
The lesson here: Don’t put anything on Facebook you’d hate to lose (or reveal to the world, for that matter).
well it’s OK here
It was here, too… until today. It seems that more people were added to the list after the initial batch.
Is this a result of trying to grow too fast – and accomplish too many things to remain super competitive?
I’m waiting to see how freaked out people get. I’m guessing someone is going to predict a specific failure mode for the company, possibly complete with valuations over time as this event sends Facebook into an entirely predictable heat-death.
I mean really, how lame can they be to not recognize the significance of CHECKBOXES. Oh noes.
If it was checkboxes it would have been one thing, but these are radio buttons….
What if this wasn’t an accident? Email notifications are one of the most proven ways to drive user engagement. What if they “lost” the data intentionally but make it look like an accident so that no one got upset?
Yeah I thought of that too. Either way, this proves more and more Facebook is not trustworthy. I mean if you’ve reset my email notification settings by mistake, you may be caution and set them all to OFF rather than on. Which could cause more?
Ofcourse in their case, which could make more profit?
I think they did this “mistake” to let more people turn on the new “birthday reminder” released a few weeks ago
i second that
When I was 14 years old I was always asking my tutors, when we delete Data from our PCs where the hell it goes, and I got no accurate answer. Now I am having this question but in another form, How did Facebook lose these settings ?
Incompetence Ahmand. There are backups for these types of things, asking customers go to back into their account means they have a lot of problems which are just now, cracking up towards the surface of their software. OR they are trying to test what happens to their systems with traffic surges (which this has caused).
Jon
http://DreamClue.com … get the message!
Next going for the privacy settings and some accounts. lol
indeed
The sad thing is not just the fact they lost people’s data (which is pretty pathetic in itself. I mean, come on, this is a billion dollar company – they can afford a few backups).
It’s the fact that they put a link in their email to Facebook. What were they thinking? That email looks like its from a Nigerian scammer. It’s got phishing written all over it.
But because they’ve done this, people are going to assume that Facebook will do this in the future, so when they do get a fake email, they’re going to click on a link and log into a mock up version of Facebook, and have their account hijacked.
That is the really sad thing. That the staff at Facebook did not realize this.
I agree with anon… either they do not make backups (disturbing for a $billion website) or they somehow lost both the production data AND backup data (possible). As for the email, notice they actually put a URL address, not a link. You should always copy and paste any address in an email, or type it in, instead of clicking links.
On a sidenote, techcrunch really needs to lower their security policy, when anon2 has to reply to anon because you block so many people, it’s getting ridiculous.
@Anon: What has Nigeria got to do with Facebook loosing peoples settings? Was phisinging invented by Nigerians? It would be nice if you focus on the topic at hand.
*phishing
nothing. but its commonly known that the majority of email scams originate from Nigeria.
It’s not a simple case of backing up a single database. They probably either have corrupted backups, corrupted data or have changed the way it works in such a way that copying over the data would not be worth the cost.
Remember when you’ve got scale as much as Facebook, it’s not just a simple case of using phpMyAdmin to backup a database. They would have complex caching and storing mechanisms for this kind of data.
Until you’ve worked on large-scale systems, it’s impossible to understand how easy it is for things to go wrong, even if there are backups in place.
As a Database Administrator, I can’t imagine not being able to roll the mistake back. If I were to make such a mistake, I would simply pop open one of my 3rd party applications to read the transaction log and roll back the offending statement(s). If I didn’t have that tool, I would restore to a point in time and do a data compare. If I didn’t have that option, I would restore the data to a point in time and say “if you made changes since x:xx pm, you will have to redo those changes”. Maybe they did one of these options, but it doesn’t sound their plan was granular enough given the amount of data loss.
Many options, but simply “losing data” and leaving it at that isn’t good enough. Of course I’m not privy to the type of error here, but even with tens of millions of records (users) this isn’t a big deal to reverse if you are prepared. Makes me wonder what other types of things they aren’t prepared for.
This type of mistake is what I call a “resume generating event” for someone.
Allen, founder
http://madtownlounge.com
I doubt very much that this is a case of data loss. This tactic is more commonly referred to as “Negative Option Marketing”, ie. you have to perform some tedious action in order to prevent yourself being subjected to their torrent.
How do you know it’s not a data loss? This has been rolling all week. It started on Monday. I got one this morning. How many data losses have ever heard of that are progressive? More hamfisted mismanagement by Facebook’s new “adult” management team.
Not sure I agree – settings are almost undoubtedly stored in a database, and they said they “were lost”. Losing secured data isn’t easy. It could be a creative tactic, sure, but it would be absurd to think they wouldn’t come out and just be a bit more honest.
I am not sure that this has anything to do with the loss of data of some of the users but last night FB killed my account with no warning and so far no reason. check out this post. if you guys have reccos let me know.
http://joannape...activation.html
If you are spamming TC, then you likely went into a bunch of groups in Facebook and did the same thing. Users clicked the report link. Facebook determined you were a spam cockroach and kicked you out….
A couple weeks ago I noticed that my Facebook notifications actually went completely silent. They’d lost mine, too, but instead of switching everything to “on”, everything was now switched “off.” Still lousy no matter which way you look at it…
Same happened to me and a friend a few weeks ago. Took me a while to work out why I wasn’t seeing anything.
It looks like they’ve been messing around with this stuff for a while now.
I don’t think need to make such a big deal, I doubt they will lost any thing else..
You make a good point with a good lesson, but I would like to think that Facebook would be more careful with more serious settings like privacy, simple email notifications aren’t that big of a deal. At least not in my opinion.
That’s a lil bit dangerous for me, it seems dat the gayz behind fb r not caring
FACEBOOK Improve your blogging of these things and contact options!
Users can’t even get an answer to a simple question like this while we’re spending millions online to combat phishing attempts.
You’re freakin Facebook!
Enough closed ears bullshit!
Oh you all get a life
“The lesson here: Don’t put anything on Facebook you’d hate to lose (or reveal to the world, for that matter).”
uh, isn’t that what people should be keeping in mind regardless of the site? shit happens and anything you put on ANY site could be lost or revealed at any time.
I did not face this issue but something different. I am blocked from writing on other’s wall as “i have been abusing it by sending a lot of wall messages per day”, in reality in very rare cases only I use wall. My total wall usage would be 20 in a year. Seems like FB ppl have lost some other data as well.
or you’ve installed a lame-o fb app that is consuming your wall posts behind your back.
Explains why I haven’t been receiving e-mail notifications of messages, invites, friend requests, etc. The stuff I actually want to know about. Funny thing is, I rarely go to Facebook anymore, so if it doesn’t e-mail me, I’ll be happyily humming along on Twitter, Qik, Utterli or my blogs.
a bit late of a story. you’re not the only one, read about this a few hours ago here:
http://buzznews...formation-lost/
Were I more cynical, I’d be thinking that this “data loss” would result in a lot more people returning to Facebook and therefore pushing up usage levels again.
Facebook sucks. It’s a pile of PHP crap. I don’t understand why a company with 500M $ cash can’t afford to rewrite that stuff using JBoss Seam.
Unless they do, things like this or worse will happen again and again.
Because PHP is always the cause of problems on the Internet.
Actually, only Facebook-specific notification settings were lost. App settings were unaffected.
Ever since Facebook forced its new interface on users even though a large percentage of people didn’t like it, I have been second guessing my Facebook use. There are so many other Social Networking tools and websites out there that it becomes hard to justify sticking around Facebook.
Something like 1-2% of all Facebook users opposed the interface. Hardly a “large” percentage. Secondly, they had the option to switch back for several months before the changes were made, to get used to the new interface.
Do you know how much money it would cost, and how limiting and inconvenient it would be to host TWO versions of a huge website like Facebook? It’s just not feasible. The new interface is an update, it makes the UI faster and easier to use. It comes down to people lacking common sense that don’t like it because they don’t know how to use it.
It is very painful to turn off every notification individually. They should have give “Turn Off All”
no big deal to me, just notice that they’ve never send notif to me. which is good tactic coz i have to login to fb, instead of reading my wall and photo comment from my mailbox.
Are you kidding me? They did not lose any data. This is just an excuse to spam everyone and boost traffic up and try to get people to return. Notice that it happened over a 4 day weekend so news sources wont pick up on it? Shady…
The biggest benefit is that now, all the apps we have stopped from notifying us, they can now reach us and some of us are going to click on those apps again (some of us actually don’t uninstall the apps, just stop the notifications), which generates more clicks to them again and more traffic.
It’s just an idea, after all losing a backup in a $billion dollar company its hard to believe, if M$ is changing Hotmail and Spaces from time to time, and HI5 is also changing layouts and properties of the user’s profiles, how come the no.1 social platform not having backups.
Ridiculous.
Sorry for my poor English, the point i was trying to make was that the losing of the notifications settings are a benefit to Facebook itself has several people noted.
It will drive the traffic to Facebook and its applications.
I received this email, but when I went to check my notification preferences, they were as normal. I found this site when I did a google search just to see if the email was a fraud….
i didn’t get a message telling me anything and now i get emails notifying me of happenings on facebook when i set it all to OFF.
so annoying.. i had to do that
I turned everything OFF again….
Facebook seems to be going thru a rough time I guess.First losing the twitter deal and then this glitch .
Whatever happened to backups…
Thats sucks! When i received this mail, I thought it is phishing mail as the mails come from facebookmails.com I never noticed that facebook mails from this domain. Still, I followed the URL and have seen that right site is coming. Now confirmed seeing this post.
What next?
.
Its my profile
radio button resets are a pita – especially with 120 apps
opt out of all would be a nice option
this Monday, in Israel, an anti-spam law will be registered. thought it had to do with it
That’s why we are offering loudhive.com IF you want to change the way networking works, here is your chance. We are an openSOURCEsocial network. All welcome http://www.loudhive.com
This tech stuff drives me nuts! Just when you get things working smoothly…zap…you’re screwed by anonymous propeller heads or their bosses who order them to screw users.
I went through Blogger.com hell for months while they used us a guinea pigs and now Facebook? Is Facebook doing the same?
Whatever the reason (motive?) just go away for a while. Let them learn a lesson. Eventually things will get back to normal.
I REALLY doubt why did they keep the default settings as ON. They should have kept them OFF!
Didn’t happen to me at all. My settings are still all the same.
>The lesson here: Don’t put anything on Facebook you’d hate to lose (or reveal to the world, for that matter).
In other news, blue sky is blue.
It’s probably a server glitch or coding gone wrong. I didn’t click the site in the email, but went to my Facebook directly, and was notified there that my email notify settings were lost. Went in and reset them, and am getting notifies once again. Go figure.
This was funny. Why couldn’t Facebook have the default for all these settings be Off instead of On? Oh, because then they wouldn’t be able to spam you if you forgot to change your settings back to what you want. Silly.
Stop being naive people, this is obviously a massive strategy to boost traffic even more by silently being able to spam members due to “data loss”.
If it wasn’t, they could have assuaged everyone by setting the notifications to Off instead of On.
Did Facebook put the interns in charge of the servers this weekend? EPIC. FAIL.
This was funny. i happened to me, but i think it is still facebook is good, unless they lose something else .
I received the notification a couple of times but my settings actually had NOT changed.
They didn’t LOSE anything. They used this as a cover to RESET everyone’s MARKETING preferences so they can make lots of $$$. People don’t care if it’s unstable, they’ll keep using it, only now they can get spammed with ads.
I am 99% sure that facebook has changed my privacy settings in the past without my authorization. I suddenly became discoverable after pointedly making sure only friends could search for me.
forget that work on facebook ads
I thought this was really annoying. They need an “all off” option, for crying out loud! It’s great that they have very granular controls, but what if you don’t need email from them at all?