Oops! Facebook glitch sends friend request to users you’ve been ‘stalking’

YOU’VE probably done it too. Perhaps you wanted to find out more about a new colleague, your son’s new girlfriend, that chap you dated donkeys’ years ago – and logged on to Facebook to do a little, er, light detective work.

Well, your blood will run cold to learn that an embarrassing glitch in the social media giant’s app exposed so-called stalkers to the people whose profiles they had been perusing.

The bug sent automatic friend requests to any accounts the ‘snoopers’ had viewed, leaving users scrambling to cancel the requests to cover their tracks.

Some people have been left so mortified they have deactivated their accounts. The problem went viral after one humiliated user posted: ‘This is a cool new Facebook fact. If you check someone’s Facebook that you’re not friends with, it automatically sends a friend request for you.

‘It’s true because I’m now friends with my ex-husband’s wife.’

Another Facebook user had a better outcome, triumphantly writing: ‘Got a friend request from an ex – thanks Facebook for letting me know they are still obsessed with me.’

Warnings about the glitch were shared on the platform as well as on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram. But for many it was already too late.

Users described their hearts ‘racing’ as they rushed to see if they had been caught. One wrote: ‘Deactivated my Facebook because I can’t remember whether or not I was stalking people when it was glitching.’ Facebook apologised for the issue, which was triggered by an app update, and told users they can cancel pending friend requests in their activity log.

A spokesman for Meta, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg that runs Facebook, said: ‘We fixed a bug related to a recent app update that caused some Facebook friend requests to be sent mistakenly.

‘We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.’