If you have received a message like this and do not know how it all happened, then you would be glad to know that you are not alone. a number of users across the world have received similar messages and surprisingly, they have had different reactions to this. While some have taken it in a rather funny way, others have been extremely sarcastic on other websites like Twitter. Check out some of the reactions of people below:
When everyone at Facebook starts drinking 16 hours early pic.twitter.com/0vrRPnctuM
— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) December 31, 2015
From shock to laughter, to utter sarcasm, Facebook was able to gather all sorts of reactions on its new bug. All these images, collected from various sources over the internet show how widespread this problem was.
But why did this problem occur?
Facebook has always had a reputation of keeping things prim and proper, never to give people a chance to complain. of late, new features are getting introduced, and with so much to work on, somehow, some important points are getting missed out.
This is exactly what happened when the programmers at Facebook wrote the ‘Friends since’ feature code. They were not aware of the various problems that could have occurred when the time zones went through a change or some other major factor concerning dates happened.
Certain computers in the world tend to count the date from the Unix Epoch, that is from 1/1/1970. This date is set as zero. At some points, this date can be mixed up to be 12/31/1969, especially if the person has been friends with this mate before the Friends since feature was written. Computers that start counting from Unix epoch generally do not know what to use before that time and and consider the time to be a date as well. The default answer given out by the system is 12/31/1969, which when calculated shows the current date to be 46 years from the date when the Unix Epoch actually started.
This issue has hence been fixed by Facebook, but chances are that we might see it again, unless Facebook changes the codes on the program.