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Confusion over a mistaken cyber security issue sees Meta delete thousands of events using the Aussie ticketing system.
Thousands of Australian event organisers had a mild heart attack last week, as Facebook owner Meta began deleting event pages wholesale, citing a cyber security risk.
The deletions began Thursday morning, with some event promoters waking up to find their pages – complete with ticket sales information and posts from fans rudely deleted.
“Around 9am on Thursday, May 16, my business partner Rachel messaged me with screenshots asking if we’d been targeted by mass reporting as several of our posts had been removed, stating they go against Facebook’s community standards – a cyber security threat,” local promoter Jessica told Cyber Daily.
“We scuffled for about half an hour appealing these decisions until we saw several other promoters were having the same issue.”
The message that Jessica and many other promoters received from Meta initially warned them they were trying to “gather sensitive information” or had “shared malicious software”.
“Your content goes against our standards on cyber security,” Meta’s content removal notice said.
However, a quick check on the site of the ticketing service Jessica uses – Australia-based Humanitix – revealed that the problem was even more widespread.
“We are investigating reports of an issue preventing the sharing of Humanitix event links on Meta platforms,” Humanitix said on a dedicated status page on the morning of 16 May.
Later the same morning, Humanitix was able to go into more detail.
“Facebook has had an error in their system and blocked posts with links to Humanitix ticketing pages,” Humanitix said. “The Facebook team are aware of the issue and are now working to deploy a fix on their systems as a top priority.”
Meta didn’t release a statement until Friday, however, when it admitted the gaff.
“We are aware of a technical issue that is impacting Humanitix events on our platforms, our teams are urgently looking to resolve this matter,” a Meta spokesperson said. However, at no point has Meta contacted concerned promoters whose events were mistakenly deleted.
“We got no word from Meta during or after the incident,” Jessica said. “We had some promo we wanted to post that day but had to move because of this, although we’re lucky our event wasn’t that weekend like some of our friends. “
As of Friday afternoon, Humanitix reported that “Meta has confirmed that all Facebook event links expedited by Humanitix have been restored”.
“Meta confirms they are continuing to restore all remaining content, including Facebook Events and Meta advertising assets. Humanitix is continuing to help expedite this process for affected hosts,” it said.
Later that day, all the deleted content was restored, but the event remains worrying for the impacted promoters.
“It was a stressful situation for us all, particularly before we were aware that we weren’t alone,” Jessica said.
“These events are important to us and our community, and Meta dominating the social media landscape means they’re a necessary evil for us to get the word out about our events. This incident showed us how fragile this thing we’re forced to depend on is and how quickly and easily they can take it away from us.”
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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