Facebook hit with bug that deletes users’ posts

A bug that hit Facebook on Thursday caused posts of scores of users to vanish abruptly,  leaving users nonplussed. Other account holders were left equally clueless when they could not link to external content and were erroneously told they were violating the site's security policy.

The issue angered many small business owners who use the service to promote their wares. The social network has, however, issued an apology and corrected the error.

"An error in our system that helps block bad links on Facebook incorrectly marked some URLs [web addresses] as malicious or inappropriate," said Facebook in a statement. "As a result, some existing posts were hidden, while other posts were blocked completely.

"We've resolved the issue and the remaining affected URLs are being unblocked. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused."

It was not clear how many users were affected by the bug.

Meanwhile, Facebook users complained that the social network was experiencing a problem that stopped people posting pictures.

A developer, ''La Carmina'' filed a bug report stating that ''every post I publish on my site does NOT show a featured image when I try to share the link in Facebook''.

Though the bug had been resolved, developers found their own way around the problem by inserting a couple of lines of code that described an image's height and width.

Website developers and administrators were angry as among those affected were people who relied on Facebook to propagate their content and the absence of images made that harder.