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Facebook Glitch Ages Friendships By 46 Years
Facebook helped its users usher in the New Year with memorable posts but for many it was 1970 in the offing, thanks to a date glitch.
According to NDTV users woke up to suggestions to see some memories of their 46-year friendships. Bizarre, given that Facebook itself is just 11! The social media giant identified the bug and worked a fix but did not specify what turned the clock back. Several people took to Twitter and Facebook to share the anomaly.
Microsoft engineer Mark Davis offered a plausible explanation - friendships on Facebook that predated the 'friends with since' feature lost track of time. A glitch, not so uncommon in Unix systems, must have resulted in a reset to the Unix Epoch, 1/1/1970.
"Well, if you click on your "memories" page, you'll see a subset of you friends listed as having a 46 year old Facebook memory today. Scrolling through my list, it's the people I've been friends with on Facebook for a very long time - chances are, the "friends with since" feature was implemented AFTER I became friends with those people. And as such, it's stored in the database as '0' rather than the actual date," Davis said, according to TIME.
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