In the beginning of September, there was a zero-day security vulnerability in Chrome. See:

Google Chrome emergency update fixes new zero-day used in attacks

Before I managed to update my browser, on September 6th, my Facebook profile got taken over and hacked. It created several commercial advertisements and then got my profile blocked by sharing some very disturbing content. Pretty much same scenario as here: What I Learned From Being Targeted By A Sophisticated Facebook Hack

I’m sure this is a pattern that Meta employees have to be familiar with by now, as I’m aware this has been happening to a lot of people recently.

After this happened, I have been able to restore my profile temporarily, set up a new password and a two-factor authentication. For 30 days however I kept being reminded that my profile was scheduled for deletion. In the emails, there was a link where I could presumably appeal for reassessment of the decision, but the link was broken and lead nowhere. So due to Facebook bug I had no means to appeal my case within the 30 days limit. After the death clock was finished, the profile got deleted. After I logged in, I only got the option to download all my data, which is also broken. It only contains about 2 MBs of data, and there is pretty much nothing in the archive. Not nearly the amount of content I’ve produced on the site for 14 years of the profile existence.

I know the deletion can be reversed even after the 30-days quota is finished; as I personally know someone who’s had this done by a friend working at Meta. So apparently it’s not about them not being able to fix this, after the thirty days, but simply not willing. This, combined with the fact that some time ago Meta discontinued all their live support and contact mail addresses (therefore there is no way to get to an actual human being in the support process, without pulling some insider strings) comes across as arrogant and absolutely not caring about their user base.

I wanted to put this out there so hopefully SEO bots pick this up and the post reaches the next person affected by this. Apparently there’s been more of us – especially since this September – and the only way to make Meta do something about this is to put some pressure on them by having numbers and being vocal about the problem. If you have a similar experience, please feel free to share what happened to you in the comments and/or if you managed to get your profile back.