Facebook, we have a problem: publishing bug found on official pages (updated)

18 May 2016

While regular users of Facebook continue to post funny pictures of cats, publishers are finding themselves frustrated with the news that official pages, where publishers etc post news content and updates, are down.

For publishers of online content, Facebook is one of the most crucial mediums in which it is shared, with sites like Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post reaching millions per month through the medium.

So news that many publishers – including yours truly – are finding that a major bug is stopping them sharing updates on their official page is proving quite the problem.

So far, what posters to Facebook Pages are finding is an error message saying simply that “there was a problem updating your status. Please try again in a few minutes”, but a few minutes later, the same thing is still happening.

Facebook screenshot

Regular Facebook remains active

Regular Facebook users might not notice anything amiss, with posts on personal pages appearing to be uploading as normal, but they may begin to notice that there is not as much content filling their News Feed as normal.

Although, it appears you can still post to Pages using mobile, so some publishers may use that as a workaround.

The importance of Facebook to news publishers was most recently seen during the controversy surrounding the social network and accusations of bias against conservative views after a number of former Facebook workers said they were told to manipulate the site’s trending topics.

The situation was considered so serious that founder Mark Zuckerberg was required to make a statement, in which he promised to meet conservative leaders to allow them to air their grievances about these allegations of bias.

As for the downtime being experienced by publishers and social media managers, Facebook has yet to release a formal statement on the matter and when it will be fixed, but we’ll have an update once we hear anything.

Update 15:55

And we’re back. News websites, including ourselves, are now able to post news content on to official pages.

Facebook app image via Bloomua/Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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