Reflecting an emotional—if not physical—reality that many people might be coping with this week, Facebook has been accidentally declaring a number of its users dead this afternoon. Many users of the popular social network have reported seeing a banner pop up on their Facebook profiles, reading “Remembering So-and-so” and asking their friends to “find comfort” in the things people are sharing.
It’s not clear what’s causing the bug—which is presumably related to the service’s “memorialized accounts” feature—but the virtual body count seems staggeringly high, ignoring such factors as fame, social status, or even whether someone is the founder of Facebook himself:
Luckily, we all learned earlier today that Facebook can’t actually impact anything in the real world, so we can rest assured in the knowledge that it doesn’t really matter if the service thinks we’re alive or dead.