Facebook glitch celebrates 46 years of online friendship

Many users are noticing that Facebook is sending out random congratulations for 46 years of friendship between them and a random friend. Facebook didn’t note the cause of the error, but said it was working to correct it.

Facebook blamed a software bug.

While Facebook bugs don’t often pique the public’s interest unless they brush up against privacy, this particular one happens to come with a fascinating computer science backstory.

No, Facebook isn’t trying to prank people.

December 31, 1969 is a common bug in tech as it refers the Unix epoch date.

Facebook started congratulating their users for their friendships’ longevity with a Years of Friendship announcement, but the tool has glitched for some users.

The issue was probably rooted in the Unix operating system, which notes January 1, 1970, as day “0”, a Microsoft developer posted on Twitter.

So this could be the social network’s version of Y2K, which was the fear that computer systems’ truncated date logs would make the year 2000 look no different than 1900. No, you haven’t been in a coma for decades, Facebook has just messed up.