46 years of friendship? Facebook glitch bungles the math
SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook is making some of its users feel a lot older than they really are.
The social network sent automated messages Thursday inviting many users to celebrate "46 years of friendship on Facebook" with one or more of their online friends.
Since Facebook itself is only 11 years old, the math certainly doesn't add up. Not to mention the fact that many people who got the message are much younger than 46 themselves.
Facebook and Twitter quickly filled up with posts poking fun at the obvious error.
Facebook blamed a software bug. It didn't offer details, but computer experts speculate the problem stems from a quirk in Unix, an operating system used in big data centers where companies like Facebook store information. The glitch starts the internal calendar on some computers at midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, Jan. 1, 1970.
Facebook said its engineers are fixing the problem "so everyone can ring in 2016 feeling young again."
For tech geeks in search of a deeper explanation, Gizmodo cited this post by Microsoft engineer Mark Davis:
...to those of you unaware, the Unix Epoch (aka the date that has an internal value of '0' on a Unix system) is 1/1/1970, which based on time zone adjustments, can become a random hour on 12/31/1969. Which is 46 years ago today.
Now, you might be wondering, so what? Why is it in my Facebok feed? Well, if you click on your "memories" page, you'll see a subset of you friends listed as having a 46 year old Facebook memory today. Scrolling through my list, it's the people I've been friends with on Facebook for a very long time - chances are, the "friends with since" feature was implemented AFTER I became friends with those people. And as such, it's stored in the database as '0' rather than the actual date. The developer who wrote the "friends with since" memories algorithm should have added a case 'WHERE friendsWithSinceDate != '0" or something along those lines. But they didn't so those people appear in today's query.