Facebook Temporarily Killed Off A Lot Of Its Users

There’s no worse way to find out you’re dead than through Facebook.

Numerous users of the site found that their personal pages had apparently been “memorialized” — a designation normally reserved for the deceased — around 3:45 p.m. on Friday.

Minutes later, however, it appeared that many pages were back to normal. Some users never even realized they had been sent to the grave and back.

While it’s possible the election tore open some hole in the space-time continuum, resulting in people witnessing the digital results of their own death, Politico reporter Hadas Gold tweeted that the site had referred to the issue as a “bug.”

Facebook told The Huffington Post that what happened was a “terrible error.”

“For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialized profiles was mistakenly posted to other accounts,” the spokesman said in an emailed statement. “This was a terrible error that we have now fixed. We are very sorry that this happened and we worked as quickly as possible to fix it.”

This article has been updated with comment from Facebook.