Did you notice your Facebook account signed itself out today? While others also noted the site emailed users noting security checks were needed, the company said the account issues were not security related.
It started when the social network went down early in the morning, then came back online and users were notified “Someone may have logged into your account”, and asked users to go through security check steps.
Facebook told TNW this morning in a statement:
“Earlier today an error in one of our systems designed to help prevent suspicious account access sent a small set of people to our account recovery flow unnecessarily. We have fixed the issue and are in the process of clearing the affected accounts from this recovery flow. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
The same issue occurred for Google accounts, specifically Gmail users. Users may have noticed their accounts had magically signed out.
Google told users in a tweet, “We know some of you had issues signing in today. Please try again now. Rest easy — your account’s security was not affected.”
We experienced both of these issues with Facebook and our Gmail accounts, earlier this morning. The first thing that came to our mind was maybe this was related to the Cloudflare bug that was patched. But if we are to believe the statements given by Google and Facebook, it looks like the sign outs were definitely not security related, although the timing does seem suspect.
