Facebook might be one of the biggest tech companies in the world, but embarrassing bugs can strike anywhere, anytime.
Over the last couple of days, users have been noticing that Facebook has been behaving a little…strangely. What first surfaced was a glitch in Facebook’s trending tab, which seemed to be a little pessimistic about the number of people talking about the topic.
Certain topics in the trending tab had a negative number of people talking about them. And these weren’t any small negative numbers – John Oliver, was instance, was being discussed by a whole -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 people. That’s about 9,223,372,036,000,000,000 more people than there are on this planet.
Experts believe that the condition was caused by an integer overflow, a programming error in which a computer loops around the number cycle and starts counting things in reverse.
And it wasn’t just the math that was off. Some of Facebook’s UI is behaving strangely.
Users have reported seeing weird hanging numbers . In the screenshot above, Facebook typically has a list of people who’ve liked the post, but now only has a number that stands awkwardly next to number of likes.
Yes, Facebook goofs up too. You can now feel a lot better about your college coding projects. 😛