Facebook bug 'kills' users in 'terrible error' (opens in new tab)

The biggest thing I take away from this is that users have learned to tolerate minor problems in software. I always make it a personal goal to have 0 bugs, but never succeed. It is good that users cut us some slack, because it means we can spend some time pushing the featureset forward, rather than making everything 100% perfect 100% of the time. (Be more careful if you're working on life-critical software, though. Features are not necessarily the most important thing there ;)

"We hope people who love %s will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate %s life." is one of the most insincere code commits of that day. Let others write about a lost loved one, not robots.

"An unusual bug on Facebook briefly labelled many people as dead."

You know, I bet it was something to do with `memorializeUser` again (see https://www.columbia.edu/~ng2573/zuggybuggy_is_2scale4ios.pd... slide 46). In fact I would go so far as to say this is the kind of thing that should be encoded in the type system so it's a compile error to try to do this.

Thirty years from now: Same headline without quotes.

I have to wonder what the attempted feature was that resulted in this.

Let's wait for the post-mortem on this one.

Who uses Facebook?