Wait, what group? A bug has caused a significant percentage of Facebook users to see a message atop their news feed announcing “This group is scheduled to be archived”. But don’t worry, your news feed is safe. The alert shouldn’t have appeared there, and only belongs on old groups set up prior to October 2010 which Facebook is migrating to the new format used today.
[Update: Facebook appears to gotten this problem under control in just a few minutes. It has confirmed the issue was caused by a bug and says it has been removed from the homepage, noting “We’re sorry for any confusion.”]
Facebook Groups were one of the site’s earliest features. They functioned sort of like forums that users would have to actively check to see new content. Then in October 2010, Facebook relaunched the product as collaboration spaces that notified users of new posts. However, there were lots of legacy old groups still around.
To solve this, Facebook devised a plan to convert legacy groups to the new format. Content would be archived and ported, but not members. This was to protect users from being notification spammed by other group members. To help users understand this slightly confusing process, Facebook began showing alerts at the top of groups scheduled to be migrated. Today it seems something caused this alert to accidentally appear on the home page’s news feed.
This type of disruption is an unfortunate side effect of Facebook’s “Move Fast And Break Things” company culture. While it allows Facebook to iterate quickly and test new products on small segments of the user base, code pushes can have unintended consequences.
[Image Credit: AcheiveGood]