Facebook Accidentally Blocks Imgur

Accidents happen. When it does, it is a good idea to come out when you accidently did something wrong.

On Monday, Facebook accidentally blocked Imgur, the photo sharing site. When users tried to post Imgur links to their profile pages and timelines, they are greeted by a Facebook message saying that the links are “blocked for being spammy or unsafe.”

While Facebook users did not notice the issue, Reddit users took it to the forum complaining about it. After a couple of hours after a picture of the error message was posed on Reddit, the image became the most popular post on Reddit gaining more than 900 comments. Recently, the Facebook engineer (known as fisherrider in the forum) in charge of the blocks apologized on the accidental block of Imgur on the Reddit post and apologized by linking to a picture of his dog on the fourth of July. He said

Hey folks – so this is actually my fault. Literally, I’m the guy who accidentally blocked imgur for a brief period of time today. I’m really sorry.

Some background: I’m an engineer who works on the system we use for catching malicious URLs. In the process of dealing with a bad URL that our automated defenses didn’t catch, I ran into a rare bug that caused us to incorrectly block some legitimate URLs for a brief time. Right after I figured that out and removed the bad data, I reworked the UI so no one will get bit by the same issue in the future.

As a form of apology that I’m sure is insufficient, here is a picture of my dog dressed up for the 4th of July:http://imgur.com/pR4mR .

[edit: don’t put a period right after the . in the imgur link, as apparently the reddit mobile site linkifies the .]

The problem was that Facebook system that catches malicious and spammy links ran into a bug following a “bad URL that our automated defenses didn’t catch.”

As of right now, the bug has been fixed and users are now permitted to link Imgur pictures onto their profile pages and timelines.