It's been a bad few days for Facebook parent company Meta with a multi-million dollar payout, mocking tweets about the Metaverse and now a news feed error that set the internet on fire.
People around the world saw their Facebook feeds turn from updates from friends and groups to random people commenting on celebrity pages on Wednesday evening (NZ time), even if they didn't follow the person or the commenter.
The feeds were impacted for around three hours before the company was able to resolve the problem.
"Earlier today, a configuration change caused some people to have trouble with their Facebook Feed," a company spokesperson said.
"We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted and we apologise for any inconvenience."
That didn't stop people from having a laugh at Meta's problem.
One popular tweet used the infamous Will Smith slapping Chris Rock moment at the Oscars to poke fun, while others shared bizarre posts to celebrity accounts they witnessed.
That included someone sharing a picture of a ham sandwich to Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston's page, and an attempt to Rick Roll rapper Eminem.
The glitch came just days after Meta reached a US$37.5 million settlement for violating users' privacy.
The class action lawsuit alleged the company tracked the movements of users through their smartphones without permission.
The judge still needs to approve the settlement, which covers those in the United States who used Facebook after the end of January in 2015.
Despite agreeing to settle, Meta has denied wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, in a now deleted post on LinkedIn, the artist who worked on the updated avatar of CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the work took four weeks to complete.
After sharing a widely mocked avatar last week, Zuckerberg shared the updated version indicating it was more representative of what the company's Horizon Worlds VR game was capable of.
However, it's unlikely most Horizon Worlds will get a 3D artist and multiple iterations to be able to design their own.
According to the post, Dylan Dunbar - a 3D artist at Meta - said he worked with artist Steve Rheinfrank for just under four weeks to create the real-time 3D model of Zuckerberg, going through an estimated 40 different versions before being finalised.
