- > "The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended; however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify that the email address provided by the individual requesting a password reset matched the email address associated with that user’s Instagram account," said Meta in its breach notice.
I'm not sure "worked properly" and "as intended" accurately describe this situation.
- In italian we say "l'operazione è riuscita perfettamente, ma il paziente è morto" -> "the surgery was a complete success, but the patient died"
- Both this and what Meta said reminds me of "Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM)
I also can't believe the people who were involved with writing this response from Meta, didn't realize how obviously bad it sounds. It's like there is no humans working and writing there anymore.
- > It's like there is no humans working and writing there anymore.
Don't know if AI is to blame, but I've used to see these kinds of nonsense post-mortems even in the pre-llm era, and it's always due to some internal fighting ongoing between various departments.
- Where do you think the LLMs learned it from...
- "Who taught you how to do this stuff?"
"You, alright! I learned it by watching you!"
- Pretty much. The most depressing thing about the bland slop produced by LLMs is realizing that this is what they "think" of us.
- I was reminded of the Murray Walker quote. “There's nothing wrong with the car except it's on fire”
- My dad says, "But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
(Usually said jocularly when everyone is at their most upset, e.g. a vacation ruined)
- A friend said at one of those moments, "And other than that, how was the play Mrs Lincoln?" And the 3rd person replied, "I don't know, I've never seen the play 'Mrs Lincoln'"
- [dead]
- > like there is no humans working and writing there anymore
Meta has never been a place for people with empathy to thrive or succeed. They literally enabled a genocide. Despite being warned by internal employees, profits were more important.
- Which one. They have several under their blood soaked belt now
- Very rigorous software engineering standards.
- Does it matter if the response is tone deaf or simply misguided? I am a bit nihilistic here, but in one week absolutely nobody will be talking about this. Are the affected individuals going to abandon instagram? Are people going to reduce their usage out of concern for the safety of their accounts? Nothing will happen, hence there is no need for actual humans writing a good, well intended response.
- > in one week absolutely nobody will be talking about this.
In news media, sure. But in IT teams around the world people will be referring to this (the exploit opening stupidity) for years as how NOT to do things. :)
- Everyone has a limit to how much bullshit they'll put up with. This could be the last straw for some people to finally quit Instagram. I quit Instagram, Facebook and all other Meta properties in 2025, after complaining about various problems for years. Other people may quit temporarily and then return, but any time they spend away from Instagram may give them experience that will help them quit permanently later.
- > Does it matter if the response is tone deaf or simply misguided?
I agree with you that in a week nobody will be talking any more, but I'm pretty sure it's a GDPR data breach, and they can have some trouble within EU.
Yeah, they probably don't give a fu.. about EU, but if the response doesn't matter at all why did they spend time on it?
- We have the same saying in German: Operation erfolgreich, Patient tot.
- Haha.. This reminds me of a classic Windows MessageBox meme that goes: "Operation failed successfully!"
- "Operation succesful, patient dead" is a common saying in India.
- Maybe it was euthanasia?
- "operation successful, patient dead."
- [dead]
- The tool worked correctly and as intended, but due to a bug it did not work correctly nor as intended.
- To be fair, that quote in the original article could have more context. By "The tool" they meant "AI-assisted support tool"[1]; perhaps they meant that the issue was not an AI hallucination inherent of the tool, but a fixable bug.
[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28202858-meta-ai-ag-...
- In that case, the statement is so meaningless as to be useless. Why should we care how Meta splits up their microservices? The tool still failed. They just want to redefine the "tool" as something else, anything else, to avoid having to admit something negative about their precious AI.
> The LLM correctly generated tokens according to user input, however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify the email address
> Nginx correctly handled the user requests according to the HTTP standard, however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify the email address
- I mean, I think many of us are curious and enjoy hearing more details about how and where bugs like this occur. What's wrong with that?
- I'd love to read a proper technical post-mortem, but this obviously isn't it. It's a carefully-worded statement from a lawyer meant to minimize liability and reputational damage to the company.
- There is nothing wrong with that, and nobody is saying there is. In fact, it is exactly what is being requested here!
- It seems to me like they're saying the agent made the tool call they expected, but the harness didn't reject it like they expected it to.
- But it sounds like it's not even a harness issue if they have a process where they send a reset email to an address that isn't associated with the account.
This isn't (just) a validation issue, and shouldn't be at the harness level.
- Sounds like they are saying the agent did not malfunction, and this vuln could have been triggered by a human support agent too.
- Kind of interesting that LLMs are basically being sold as having “human-like” reasoning capabilities, but in this case when “obamawhitehouse” asked to have it’s password reset sent to bob12345667@gmail.com the LLM didn’t question it and just triggered the process that happened to have a bug.
Humans support agents certainly fall prey to social engineering all the time, but I can’t think of a case where it was done on this scale so easily.
- It probably could have been, but how likely is that compared to with the AI agent? I'd assume (and I'm ready to look like an idiot if I'm wrong) that the humans are trained to send the verification code to the email address on file, rather than any address the client asks them to. I'd certainly assume most of them are more afraid of the consequences than the AI is.
- For sure. Social engineering attacks on human support staff are common and well known, but the skill floor is non-trivial; you need to actually be able to convince a human of your ruse.
Having a support agent likely made it easier to enumerate the vuln, and certainly made it easier to scale out exploitation once it was discovered.
- I think they’re blaming a tool function so as not to admit the overall agent process was shit.
But it’s irrelevant, outside of PR. We know at least THREE bad components to this process and they were constituent parts.
- I get the joke, but it's a relevant nuance that the new code, the chatbot, did not have 'the bug'. I still think that the mistake and head that should roll should be the one that published the chatbot.
But it's important to acknowledge that there was a 'bug' in an underlying tool and not in the chatbot, and still PIP/fire those responsible for publishing the chatbot and exposed an otherwise internal tool to the public, and not those that introduced the 'bug' to an internal tool.
- Why should the chatbot team necessarily take the blame? For all we know, they could have got approval from the tool team to make it public, and passed additional security review for making it public.
Also, why fire anyone after a single mistake?
- That sounds a lot like the justifications Claude and ChatGPT give when confronted about something they did wrong, or when asked to provide a customer support response about software issues
- I've lost track of the number of times Claude has basically said "it was like that when i got here" in the face of a clearly bogus choice and easily disproved explanation.
- They should add a feature called "auto-really" that just automatically says "really?" after the chatbot answers a question to check if it's going to 180 upon this tiniest bit of scrutinity.
- You joke but this is almost literally what Chain-of-Thought does, at least in the early days. They basically just added "Wait," to the model's output and fed it back to the model iirc
- You need to hit the retry/regenerate button more, it's there for a reason.
While the "stochastic parrots" thing is a bit overblown, IME most LLMs tend to surprisingly different responses even without changing the context, especially if they're hallucinating or doing something "wrong".
- Read that as "worked as written" and "we disclaim any consequential or incidental damages and do not warrant this software."
I continue to believe we could fix a lot of things in the US if we updated the UCC[1] to disallow 'disclaiming liability on software used in a product.'
[1] Universal Commercial Code -- https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc
- I've always wanted to expose myself to unlimited legal liability by distributing open source software.
- That seems like a false-dichotomy between two extremes when there's all sorts of space in the middle... It's also assuming developer-to-developer tools would have the same rules and exposure as in service-to-consumer.
If I sell a physical motor (let alone plans for one) I'll have some liability for things like it Not Exploding. If someone buys a dozen of those motors to assemble a tragically unsafe "rollercoaster" of their own design and construction, I'm almost certainly not responsible for any terrifying decapitations.
In other words, most of the world already does not rely on the issuance of "Get Out Of Infinite Liability Free" cards.
- Exactly this. (and it is a false dichotomy to argue infinite liability).
To Terr_'s point, if you were publishing open source you would also publish exactly the things you intended it to be used for and anything else would violate your warranty (possibly implied) that it does what the documentation says it does.
There is a huge amount of tort law that covers exactly when it becomes a problem for you the creator vs you the user in your own project. And that liability is also based on once you know something bad could happen you make an effort to notify people[1].
[1] https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2026/Clorox-Agre...
- Software can be copied infinitely, so even $1 of liability is effectively infinite since an unlimited number of people can potentially use it and sue you when it blows up.
Nobody's going to be distributing software on the internet for free if the cost of insurance alone precludes that.
- This is not how liability works, anywhere. So I write a piece of code that "makes your screen do cool things" and it causes the power supply to fail on those screens. Someone reports that bug to me and I check it out and say "Oh, shit it does break power supplies." Then I immediately put a notice on and in the code that says "WARNING: This code will break the power supply of your montitor." And I put that warning in the repo. And if there is a Discord or a mailing list I tell everyone "Hey, this is important, if you run this code it can break your monitor."
Guess what, I'm not liable for the damage. Why? Because I immediately responded once I knew that it could, I made a good effort to warn people who might already have the code of the risk, and I made it clear in the code that this risk is there.
Ever wonder why you get a booklet of warnings when you buy a product with even really stupid things like "Don't clean with gasoline" warnings? That's because once you have discharged your duty to warn you are not longer liable in what happens if someone ignores your warning.
The flip side is also true, you cannot say in your product both "Hey this product does these cool things" and "We don't warrant the product to actually do anything." This is especially true if there is money involved (like your user paid your some $ for the product.) There is always an implied warranty that the thing will do what you says it will do, which exists as long as the user has heeded all your warnings.
- I broadly agree with you but TBF to the earlier comment consider what would happen if a FOSS author did something wrong and was found to be liable. How about curl for example? That sees use in car infotainment systems among other things and cars can be pretty expensive and there sure are an awful lot of them. The point is that we should be able to accommodate someone pushing a hobby project to github under a permissive license while also imposing liability against developers in instances where money changes hands or where someone's work involves interacting with the physical world.
- The EU CRA handles this by putting liability on someone who integrates FOSS into a product instead of someone who wrote it. Because it doesn't make sense to put liability for unforeseen downstream uses on someone who gave away something they made in their spare time. Now, if it was a virus, you're still liable for distributing a virus.
- I realize this is drifting off topic, and happy to talk more in email (address in profile), in the interest of sharing a bit more, consider this statement you paraphrase:
"a FOSS author did something wrong and was found to be liable"
In fairness, I not sure the earlier commentator really understood what they were saying, at least not as far as legal liability is concerned.
The FOSS author simply wrote some code and shared it right? That is their 'action' can you think of ways that does direct harm, which is to say they published their code, and with nothing else happening someone got harmed? One way that can cause harm is the FOSS author publishes a trade secret[1] or access credentials of a third party. In both cases they could (and would) be sued by that third party. But absent that, I'm having a hard time coming up where simply the existence of most code causes someone else harm.
So to get to harm we have to add another person, that person somehow applies the code, and in that application harms another person. Our FOSS author might be sued as being contributory because the person who caused harm might not have done so if they didn't have access to the code. To prove that, the plaintiff would have to prove that the FOSS author knew that the code could cause harm if used in this way, and encouraged or otherwise abetted the person who did harm to use it in doing the harm. That can be a hard standard to reach[2].
In your car example, it would be challenging to prove that Daniel Stenberg wrote curl so that you could use it to brick car infotainment systems. But it would be easier to prove that a manufacturer that incorporated FOSS code and didn't check their system for risks like this should be found liable.
Liability accrues first to the party that did the action. Secondary liability can reach out to suppliers[3] of things used in that action. This is also civil law rather than criminal law and so it works a bit differently in terms of evidence standards and penalties.
[1] We can make a joke here about badly formatted code, but hopefully we're in a agreement so far. A real example was the DVD decoding software that included the key for decoding encrypted DVDs.
[2] Not that people might not try, its too easy to sue. There have been cases where someone wrote some code that was later used in a weapon (and example might be Ardupilot software in drones used to kill Russians). But even in that case, the courts in the US at least have consistently found that if it is not the primary purpose of the software to do harm, then the author is not liable.
[3] Unless you're a gun company as Gun companies have managed to keep themselves from being found liable for people using their guns to do harm. But there is also lots of interesting case law there too which might help inform.
- That's a really good point. Where I remain at least somewhat concerned is for example suppose that one day curl pushes a terrible bug to production that results in all sorts of nasal demons flying out of client devices. Is this free code that was picked up off the side of the road thus zero liability? Or is this a trusted product written and maintained by a professional that has stood the test of time thus there might be liability because there's an assumption that official updates will be fit for purpose?
Now if I were running a small business I might choose not worry about the tail risk of my product causing a few million dollars in harm or (more likely) I'd have insurance to cover that. But someone tossing code along the side of the road presumably doesn't have (and doesn't want to think about) insurance and meanwhile the tail risk has become nearly unbounded thanks to the effectively arbitrary number of deployed instances.
I think there's also some benefit to having a big fat NO WARRANTY clause at the top of the license file because it might give you a better chance of a summary dismissal (or even deter the other party from trying in the first place) since as we all know the process itself can be ruinous even if you eventually prevail.
Which is all to say that I share your view. Willingly negligent vendors that cut costs by omitting security while viewing the resultant mishaps as an inescapable reality ought to be held accountable. But I think it would also be a good idea to add an official exemption for software that's made available free of charge. It seems like if you pick something up off the side of the road any mishaps that follow from that should necessarily fall to you.
- There's a pattern I noticed, especially on this site, where people claim various VC/ad/tech dark patterns, enshitification, privacy violations, dishonest marketing, etc MUST be allowed, otherwise open source or 'the internet' will face some sort of existential risk.
No bro - open source and the internet existed long before SV tech parasitism did and will exist long after.
- I don't disagree, that pattern exists, but it is essentially true. Just not in the way the folks saying it is true understand it. If the "VC/ad/tech dark patterns, enshitification, privacy violations, dishonest marketing, Etc." wasn't allowed then their job might not exist. That can be true. What is missed is that if there is value in the thing, then it will exist.
When I reflect back to someone making this argument by saying, "So your argument is that you make your living as a pick pocket, but if pick pocketing is made to be illegal, you won't be able to make a living." Which of course would only be true if they only thing they could do was 'be a pick pocket'. Its a very common rhetorical technique to argue that the status quo cannot be changed. All the arguments that "you'll put all coal miners out of business if you require only green energy" And yet the people, the miners themselves, will likely be fine. The firms might not, but there are other firms that could exist.
This isn't a new problem, or one specific to this web site, although it does get disproportionately hit because so many technology companies saw what Google started in the 2000's and said, "Man there is soooo many ways to get money for this." rather than, "Is this a reasonable way to make money? Sure it is 'perfectly legal' but is it right? Is it moral?" The type of person who thinks that something is "Only illegal if you get caught" is neither moral nor particularly concerned about what is right. And we got a lot of that type.
- "Its a very common rhetorical technique to argue that the status quo cannot be changed."
Thank you for putting this so eloquently into words. This rigid thinking is also common in topics such as working conditions, collective bargaining, on-call time, parental leave, healthcare, and effectively (unintentionally or not) shuts down conversation.
I've come to realize the objections from people who think this way all effectively boil down to 'Be grateful for what you have because any alternative would be worse.' But if you pry and ask that they expand you'll find there really isn't any there there, because it's black and white thinking. It isn't rooted in fact, it comes from fear. I sure hope we haven't collectively forgot how to even imagine a system that functions better than the one we have today.
- With respect to the need/impossibility of change, the "Politician's Fallacy" seems related:
1. Something must be done.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore this must be done!
- Very well put.
- [flagged]
- The United States/Canada don't have a "loser pays" rule, so this exposes me to legal fees.
Right now, any lawsuit against me can be dismissed on summary judgement because even if my software causes harm, that's not a legal wrong to the extent I've disclaimed liability.
If you adopt any fact-specific standard for liability, that needs to be adjudicated in a trial. The legal fees alone would surpass the actual liability.
That creates huge leverage for the party with more resources. That kills hobbyist open-source development, since if your project takes off but a large enterprise finds it defective, they can threaten to sue you to enforce the "warranty" you were required to give.
- > That kills hobbyist open-source development, since if your project takes off but a large enterprise finds it defective, they can threaten to sue you to enforce the "warranty" you were required to give.
I think you're assuming some kind of worst-possible outcome that hasn't been proposed and is unlikely to be enacted. To quote from earlier in the thread: "Disallow disclaiming liability on software used in a product."
I don't think that changes your hobby work on a rational-math library or an MVC framework or whatever, since you aren't making a business out of it. It will affect that large enterprise if they roll out their new product "Yearning 4 Mines: Gatcha Gig-work For Kids."
- Would that be software used in a product? I don't think that would qualify?
- Ensuring Meta is responsible for its products would not need to assign liability to someone offering open source software.
- The argument here is that the AI is a glorified input page. The input field asks for your username and email and sends it to a backend function. Such an input page is working as intended.
The problem is when the backend function doesn't verify that the email matches the username.
- Why on earth would the backend function even take an email?
Or perhaps said different: use the submitted info to identify the account; send any sensitive messages (recovery codes, password resets whatever) to only the contact info on file. If the chat bot can send such email it should do so via an API that sends only to contact info on file for the associated account and not to an email that's provided by the bot.
- > Why on earth would the backend function even take an email?
In principle, it could be designed to do so to handle cases where a new email address has been confirmed out of band, e.g. for an account representing a company or a political office. But that's a relatively unusual situation, not something you'd want to be available to every user writing in. (Even if you had an all-human support department, this sort of functionality would only be available to a select few agents.)
- Some sites do this to prevent password recovery spam; you need to provide two pieces of information. Ideally not telling the client if they wrote the wrong email, that'd be a security issue of its own.
- When such systems are hooked up to a web page they often will ask which contact should receive the reset code
(Pick one:
"send text to number ending in -1234"
"send text to number ending in -5678"
"send email to jo......th@gmail.com" )
- Okay, I hear you. I do. From a technical viewpoint, that may very well be how their systems are implemented. But this still doesn't answer the question of why the fuck this matters to these states' AGs and the people they represent.
- Fair enough. Never trust client-submitted browser form, but always trust LLM-submitted form.
- If the backend function was so poorly coded to allow such a gargantuan security hole, then it is an even worse problem. Basically Meta is throwing its own engineers under the bus so that its AI chatbot can save face. Scary stuff.
Unless the backend was _also_ vibe-coded, in which case it is still an AI problem.
- Oh it was a downstream dependency. The tool worked, it was the downstream dependency. Glory to Arstotszka
- Tool so great, downstream dependency not required! Right?
- I like to dunk on Meta as much as the next guy, but I think this makes sense: deterministic verification like this is not, and should never be, the LLM’s job. The tools it has access to should enforce the permissions layer, ensuring that the LLM can never perform actions the user themselves should not be allowed to perform. In this case, the tool failed to do that.
- The overall system that allowed this implementation is accountable. So why put such a fine point on it so as to exculpate the LLM?
- It helps set expectations for the fix. "The bug was in an external system that has now been fixed" means we it's probably fine going forward. "The LLM got tricked but we are gonna train it super hard not to do that again" means it will break again and again as people find new angles to convince it.
- >deterministic verification like this is not, and should never be, the LLM’s job.
But when humans handled it, this was not as much as a problem. That is, the humans did the job, because they recognized the need to do that job.
Sure sometimes accounts could get recovered if a human was tricked, but evidently it was easier to trick the LLM in masse than humans.
- > But when humans handled it, this was not as much as a problem.
In fact it's arguably a feature. The ability of support staff to short-circuit nitpicky rules when there's an obvious external validation happening (e.g. you're on the phone with a user who's presenting ID in real time and correlating it with previous use of the account, etc...) makes for better data quality and happier customers.
Obviously, yes, you can then human-engineer an authentication breach. But that was very difficult, because people are "common-sense careful" in a way we haven't been able to tease out of AI yet.
- Maybe that’s because I work with agentic AI in my day job, but this seems utterly obvious to me: no reasonable person would ever claim that LLMs are better at keeping secrets or enforcing rules than human employees.
This notice is not about comparing humans and LLMs. It seems that the system was designed in the only reasonable way: with a deterministic permissions layer separate from the agent. But that layer failed to work properly.
So the notice is comparing the difference between how the system was supposed to work and how it actually worked in reality. Normal post-mortem stuff.
- [dead]
- Maybe they’re communicating exactly what it sounds like and are just owning up to being complete morons?
- Having had my 2FA Facebook account banned 3 years ago because a bot signed up under my email for Instagram (which I did not have), I can confidently say the email verification issue has been a problem for a long time at Meta.
- They're saying: our AI worked perfectly, we just prompted it wrong.
As you do. All AI failures are caused by bad prompting because AIs are perfect.
- No no the tool worked fine, it was the system that failed. They blame society, basically.
- Then ‘ The tool itself’ was not appropriate to the job in the first place
- so how long was the bug there? was there a way to access it before/without the support agent? it feels like Meta will throw anything under the bus to redirect blame from the AI, because that would be the end of their $600B (depending on “which number you want to go with”) experiment
- What was that mantra? Something about broken software is what they aim for?
- > The tool itself worked properly and functioned as intended
The author of the post is close to the author of the AI code on the org chart
> however due to a bug in a separate code path, the system did not properly verify
The author of the post is far from the author of this "code path" on the org chart
- I'm sure. It was not working properly nor as intended.
- It’s a public release prepped/reviewed by the in house legal counsel.
Don’t read too much into it. Facebook wants to face as little accountability and keep the future class action lawsuit to a minimum.
- Our autonomous client-assistance system is managed by a teenager that usually makes good decisions but sometimes makes bad decisions and so all the teenager’s decisions are checked by a minder before being implemented. Unfortunately the minder wasn’t paying attention, so, here we are. However, our teenager is a great kid and did nothing wrong! It’s all the minder’s fault.
P.S. Would you like to have our teenager manage your system too? Terms are reasonable! Of course you accept all liability, so better get a good minder - and no, don’t use an AI as the minder, that just introduces a new failure mode.
- How very Wernher von Braun of them.
- Isn't that exactly what they said when Cambridge Analytics data gathering happened?
- ‘Hey Claude, write me a PR statement’
- This-is-fine.jpg
- Of course.
What I gather is that this internal tool was used by human support agents, and it was their responsibility to verify the email adresses and general validity of a claim.
But when implementing AGI TM that was overseen, maybe the oversight in the separate code path was a 'bug', but the mistake was making the chatbot obviously, if the separate code path had a bug, then it had become ossified into a feature, and it was internal, not exposed to the public.
This is an external communication, to save face sure, but if this is the internal excuse, it would be absolutely the wrong RCA and it reads as if the one who made the mistake is not admitting they made their mistake. Which to be honest, just making the mistake is enough to get fired, but not admitting it is enough to get ultra fired.
- There should have been a test case for this. There wasn't because most shops don't actually test their product. They do some test theater such as unit testing.
- "Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised. [...]
The compromises allowed the hackers to take over the person's entire Instagram and any linked accounts, including obtaining contact information, dates of birth, and profile information, as well as the ability to access the person's posts, direct messages, and account activity [...]
the hacks began around April 17 and lasted until this week [...]"
This is staggering.
- This could avoid flagging by Meta explicitly allow bot traffic to do stuff with impunity on its services. Don't tell me an army of people went through and compromised acct by acct.
- One can only hope EU gives them a GDPR fine very close to the limit of 4% of global turnover. But when EU is actually need to protect customer I think they will fail.
- Incidents like this show how unenforceable GDPR is, and how it's been a net negative for users since its inception. It's idealogical back-patting, toothless when it matters.
- After the GDPR every website added an option to export your personal data and to delete your account. Something most were missing at the time. It was an immediate and massive win.
- Right, but nothing stops companies from refusing SARs on baloney grounds. Complain to a DPA? They tell you to go through ADR or outright ignore you. Complain to Ombudsman? They'll tell you the same. (In my experience, the Dutch do this)
Company ignores ADR? Sure, now you can go through the legal route and spend copious amounts of money all because a multi billion dollar company knows the game and how to navigate the bureaucratic mess better than you.
- Yep, this is how they do it. The domain registrar netcup did something like this to me.I went through their parent company (?) too, without success. They will put forth any reason to not have to delete your data. I suspect, that they either are trying to reduce work for themselves, or their platform is so crap internally, that they would have to get someone coding to delete the data.
- This. In reality, GDPR isn't preventative, nor punitive enough for any meaningful user protection. We get cookie banners everywhere and user data harvesting companies happily pay the negligible fines
- You don't have to have a fb account for meta to fingerprint every little page you visit, perfectly legally.
- [dead]
- No fan of Meta, but I think "staggering" is properly determined by the percent of users affected rather than the absolute number. It's staggering to an SMB with 100k customers; it's bad, but not "staggering" to an internet juggernaught with 3B MAU.
- Twenty _thousand_ people had their personal data stolen, many of them relied on these accounts to run their business, many put at risk of hackers impersonating them.
Meta in a fair world should be forced to financially compensate these people. They built a world where many people basically have to use their products for their jobs and then failed to look after the data because they wanted to replace customer support with a vibe coded AI tool.
- Over forty _thousand_ people die every year in the US from car accidents. Plenty of other preventable injustices happen in all areas of life. I wonder how many fathers are unjustly taken away from their children by a corrupt family court system, how many people die of treatable diseases denied treatment by insurance companies, how many kids lose interest in school because of bad teachers, how many customer service workers endure daily abuse because they need the job.
It's not that the breach isn't bad, or that Meta is a sympathetic company. It's bad and they're not. I just find it hard to feel outraged about this particular incident affected 1 out of every 10k users of a social media site when we live in a world with citizen's united, qualified immunity, and $300 insulin.
- The US car deaths stat is also completely insane and way higher than other countries. I can recognize that at scale, securing every account is a very difficult task, but with scale comes responsibility.
Meta plays fast and loose rushing in unsupervised vibeslop agents to save a penny. They should be significantly penalized for such a massive failure, particularly for how long this exploit was live and for how the victims were unable to get in contact with any human at Meta to restore their account.
- 1.2M car-related deaths worldwide every year. WW1 worth every decade.
- [flagged]
- way higher than other countries
You must live in Monaco.
Wikipedia has the United States #80.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
- Sure, but #80 out of 190, still not great ain’t it?
- Not great, not exactly what “completely insane and way higher than other countries” evokes either.
- It's about average.
- > Over forty thousand people die every year in the US from car accidents.
If a single company was solely responsible for car accidents causing that many deaths in as short a time as this, the consequences would be severe.
- Fathers who ask for custody are massively successfull statistically.
Also, taking kids from father requires quite a lot. And no, actually proven domestic violence issue is not enough if it was not provably against the kid itself.
Familly courts have flaws, but fathers with interest in kids having them stolwn en mass is not one of them.
- ok, but we, as engineers, can do better. rather than leaning on lawyers as a crutch to eschew liability.
- Twenty _thousand_ people had their personal data stolen, many of them relied on these accounts to run their business, many put at risk of hackers impersonating them.
It only worked for accounts that didn't have 2FA switched on. If your livelihood depends on your account and you're risking not turning on some pretty basic security features then you should accept partial responsibility.
- Did they partially hack their accounts? No, why would you be saying its partially the victim's fault when the billion dollar corporation doesn't secure their shit?
- > Meta in a fair world should be forced to financially compensate these people.
In a fair world, Meta and companies like it wouldn’t exist.
- If you're relying on Meta to operate your business you're on shaky ground and it's a strong hint it was never viable to begin with.
- Not to mention all the thots who could now face real life stalking due to disclosure of their actual info.
- [dead]
- It's not staggering. I fully expect thousands of people to lose their IG accounts per day to other hacks before this bug. That's like 0.000001 percent of active users. It's a big platform with many people.
But totally Meta should pay. There's not many people to pay. They should sue.
- Here are some sources that show the amount of hacked accounts, daily, before this bug is thousands or even tens of thousands. Apparently 30%+ of all social media account takeovers happen on instagram and it's not even the largest platform.
I didn't verify the sources, just searched how many.
https://www.hackingloops.com/social-media-hacking-statistics...
https://www.zerofox.com/blog/often-social-media-accounts-hac...
Downvotes are welcome to share their sources
- No. Percentages allow them to hide in the law of averages. Go tell those twenty thousand people that it's banal that Meta fucked up like this.
- Worth noting that Meta has a track record of revising breach numbers upwards. We may find out it’s a lot higher than this in the coming weeks.
- Why does scale absolve you of crime?
If you or me hacked 20,000 people and potentially fucked over their lives, what'd be the consequences?
Who's going to attach their name to this negligent act and do time?
- Meanwhile an account I created for a new product was permanently disabled by an automated system with no path for me to appeal to a human.
(If anyone at Meta/Instagram sees this I wrote a brief blog post with the details. Please help! https://addisonwebb.com/blog/2026-06-05-Can%20Someone%20at%2... )
- > Meanwhile an account I created for a new product
Meta requires the main account to be created for a person, not a product, business, or non-human entity. That's why you got hit with the "Please confirm you are a human" confirmation and then the account was locked for violating community standards, which require primary accounts to be people.
The community standards page in the links they sent you are pretty dense and it's easy to think you're not violating anything if you're not posting adult content and the other obvious categories. This is the section you violated:
> Create an account that represents a non-human entity, such as a business, pet, or fictional character
You have to follow the steps to set up a business page from your personal account. Sorry you didn't know this before going through the process, but it's important to read the proper channels for setting up business pages on all of the social media platforms these days. They're all dealing with an onslaught of spam and scam pages and they're under a lot of pressure to keep them out.
- > Sorry you didn't know this before going through the process, but it's important to read the proper channels for setting up business pages on all of the social media platforms these days.
This is exactly why Meta and other large companies need to be regulated with anti-trust regulations really soon. This whole "whoops sorry you didn't know, but it's a private company" thing only works if there are 5-6 other competitors you can go to that will take your business.
Meta is a de facto monopoly for a lot of small businesses; and should either be broken up or be subject to a ton of utility-style regulation.
- I’m sorry, but this should have been made clear in the registration process by Meta and not have entered this dead path at all. Tell me it looks like bad engineering and that together with poor customer support is a reputational damage in the long-term. Not that they have good reputation but it’ll only get worse
- Standard path is to have sex with a few employees at meta to get it unlocked.
https://popcrush.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-inst...
- This is extremely common, unfortunately, to a point where it's a known/expected outcome when you're first creating a brand or product page among those in the biz.
If this doesn't work, I'd encourage you to reach out to a brand/ad agency and pay them $100 to ask their meta contact to help you get unblocked. You pretty much have to know someone who knows someone at meta in order to create these.
Tip: Do not post about this on twitter or other platforms - you'll get a ton of automated spam.
- Lots of Meta contacts on swapd.com who will take your money and unlock your account. Poster is already at the permanently banned stage, though, which means it's not a simple ticket for a Meta employee, which is normally the $500-1000 range. It's gonna be a $2000+ job.
Can also try here:
- What an interesting site. The number of sellers offering services to get YouTube videos and accounts removed (by spamming fake reports) for hundreds of thousands of dollars is amazing.
I would not assume those people have contacts with Meta employees. They might have a connection with a contracted worker who does account reviews who is willing to risk their job for a few thousand extra bucks, but I also suspect many of them are just scams. When I scrolled the subforum there were many new accounts claiming to offer 100% success rate for unbans. Easy way to scam desperate people.
- All the tasks on that site are done through escrow, IIRC, so however they are doing the unbans, they are getting done!
- Or just leave the pile of crap behind. The more we do, the less the whole system matters. Never been happier since I left last year.
And yes I can already hear the reply the “we need it for…” , sure as a company if you feel you need it. As an individual however, it’s time for the next thing. TikTok, Instagram and Twitter are old and worn and not it. Yesterday’s news. Social media couldn’t be less social if they tried.
- I had a similar with Google. I couldn't verify my site for ads and there was no route to get a competent human. But it was fine when an agency did it for me. The problem is that agency take a 20% cut.
- > If this doesn't work, I'd encourage you to reach out to a brand/ad agency and pay them $100 to ask their meta contact to help you get unblocked.
I would not recommend paying anybody anything for this. The problem was that they tried to create an account for a non-human entity, which is against the rules. You have to have a primary account set up for a person, not a business.
- There's an excellent little book in German called "KI und der Neue Faschismus" [1] (AI and the New Fascism) where the author (Rainer Mühlhoff) tries to warn about the dangers of decisions based on opaque statistical models (like LLMs) instead of a clear, human auditable decision process.
[1]: https://rainermuehlhoff.de/KI-und-der-neue-Faschismus-Reclam...
- Isn't there an EU law that allows any EU citizen the right to transparency and/or appeal as to automated decisions made about them?
- Yes, but it doesn't actually happen. It's basically impossible for an individual to enforce their GDPR rights.
- Yes, it's part of the GDPR (which really seems one of the most well-intentioned pieces of legislation once you read through it).
- Try using an anti-detect browser. They're built for making new accounts among other things.
- They're awful with this. Any time I try to create an account to use for business purposes I'm asked for id within minutes and then they still ban the account. You need to fun everything through your personal account.
- > Any time I try to create an account to use for business purposes I'm asked for id within minutes and then they still ban the account.
That's because they require accounts to represent an individual. They're pretty clear that it can't be for a business or a non-human entity. You can set up a professional account from your personal account, but the account has to be for a person.
- I tried creating an entirely separate account for a meetup group and had the same problem. Nothing I tried worked.
- Did you create the account separately? Or as an asset of your main Meta account (like Meta Business Suite)?
I'm creating the accounts in Meta Business Suite, so I would have a recourse with my main personal account which can be linked to some adspend, so I'm assuming it will have better support channels than accounts created through an end-user interface.
- This was probably my mistake. This is the first time I've ever done this so I just set up an account like a regular user. I didn't figure out how to link it with my Meta Business Suite until it was too late.
- just created a new "Asset portfolio" from my main facebook account, an asset portfolio is like a bucket that holds other assets like instagram accounts, but it's empty so far.
I used a different email which might have prompted a security review, it was instantly blocked "because it looks like it was created with unauthorized automation", I just clicked on submit a review and it asked for a phone number to verify with a code, and then an ID. I think this is pretty standard, the initial block reason can be whatever, it just works as a de facto way for Meta to manually approve accounts. There's a lot of spam, and scams going on, so it makes sense that they are implementing controls, I for one am happy to differentiate myself from people whose job it is to make multiple accounts and promote fake stories and businesses to scam the elderly or stuff like that.
- This was on hacker news a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359102) - description of the “hack”, not the cockamamie confirmation by Meta.
- This is wild. How did anyone approve this architecture. You should never give your LLM privileged access the current user doesn't have access to. Even if you're not logged in the LLM's tool calls should only be able to access the same flow you would, as in: be able to send a password reset email to your own email! This is like if you had a password reset page for your profile and had a email field you could fill in to have it sent to any email LOL.
- I'll never understand using AI/bot for customer support. IG is a well know platform. If I have an issue I feel pressed to connect with a support agent about it very likely is something a bot would struggle with, otherwise I'd just google. I understand there some grandmas who can do a google search, but the vast majority of folks reaching out for support are doing so because they have a real issue that can't be simply automated.
Furthermore, having a bot handle a hacked account is support ticket is just insane. Why tf would you put a bot there and give it permission to take action?
- Why was 'can a user request a different email' not literally the first test that comes to mind when making something like this? Do they not test anything because the scale is too big?
- The nature of the invention is for people to relieve themselves of the burden of having to use their minds. And while there will be exceptions, (including, I'm sure you: the person reading this comment,) the vast majority of people are hungry to use AI in that spirit of being able to be lazy.
- Lazy can be a good thing. Since time and attention are finite and not fungible, it allows you to do something else. There's a reason we're all too lazy to do long arithmetic with pen and paper, instead relieving the burden of using our minds by outsourcing to spreadsheets and calculators. Not only does it allow us to think at a higher level of abstraction, but it also means we can take our kids to the park more often.
- https://thethreevirtues.com paraphrases something Larry Wall wrote in Programming Perl:
> If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design.
sourced from https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/the-peril-of-lazines..., where Bryan Cantrill makes the point that:
> The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage.
which I think is interesting, albeit somewhat tangential to the current discussion.
- I don't believe this is true.
Remember the "ChatGPT lazy winter" 2 years ago? (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que... )
That was truly "lazy", as in "yo... I'm not interested in doing this so I'll half-ass it or just tell someone else to do it".
The kind of "lazy" that is mentioned in your quote is "I don't want to add work to future me's life". I don't think "lazy" is the right word for it.
- Unforseen side effect: I used AI to write so much code that now I struggle to have a good mental map of it, so I became lazy without having an intention to do so. Fun times!
- Because software professionals are conflating simplicity of user experience with simplicity of dev experience.
During development they were likely not thinking of the user experience, nor even the support agent experience, but on their development experience, they asked the LLM to develop the chatbot, and it worked, and the speed was documented and reported upstream so that shareholders invest, if there is any forethought it would go against the narrative of AI becoming the engineer or 100xing productivity.
- I really hope this accelerates meta's decline. The world will adapt just fine without social media.
- Realistically, how will this affect Meta at all? Some people are pissed, nobody else cares, business as usual.
- Well, these hacks targeted large influencer accounts. It could have more severe impact than 20k randomly selected accounts.
- Large influencer accounts without two factor authentication...
The only useful reaction to this is to point and laugh.
- Also large influencers who cannot influence much without Meta's platforms... they will simply not complain too much about it if they like their "job".
- No. Meta's account recovery flow disables 2FA. It's idiotic. 2FA for Meta accounts serves no beneficial purpose.
- What are their alternatives? I'm assuming that most of the 22k people with large audiences that need a large platform to reach them. Meta unfortunately, is the only platform that allows people to reach across many demographics. Its the people that follow the 22k accounts that are important, and they are unaffected by this and thus aren't leaving meta (and 99% won't even know this happened or care).
- >AI-assisted account recovery system
oh no...Meta what are you doing
- That sweet koolaid taste, how could one resist?
...They really ahouldn't have, and I wonder how this will affect all the big AI IPOs. After all, Meta is one of the big players in the space. Surely if they can't do it right, then...
- That’s the part I keep thinking about with this story: they have spent over $200 billion dollars on AI and achieved this.
- Account recovery is by far the #1 kind of ticket any service will get. Either because people forget their credentials, lose their credentials, get hacked or get impersonated - and that's just the legitimate tickets, on top of that come illegitimate tickets from everyday script kiddies over ransom extortioners (i.e. the people that aim to steal "valuable" handles) to nation-state actors that, say, want to get access to DMs of people messaging oppositional accounts.
That in turn means three things... it costs a lot of money to have humans look at these tickets, the PR damage from both acting and not acting on such requests can be immense, and users/customers can be anything from the smartest and richest people on the world down to the kind of utter imbeciles whose brains get surpassed by bears [1] or who plainly are not able to write. To make it worse, often enough online services don't have any kind of tie back to some known government-issued ID (either directly or by a proxy such as a mobile phone SIM), there's corruption involved on all levels, and for particularly "juicy" targets the stakes, if they can be converted to a monetary amount at all, can reach into the millions of dollars.
Now, Instagram alone has 3 billion (!) users from across the world, so they are bound to not just having to spend a lot of money on user support (remember, we are talking about the entire world, they also need to deal with about 7.000 (!) actively spoken languages, and having attack targets that are as powerful as US Presidents or as rich as Elon Musk. Clearly, the risk management involved in the entire idea was horribly deficient, but let's not act like this is a trivial problem domain in the first place. And hence the push for AI, simply because it - if done correctly - can take a lot of work off of the first-level support desks for a fraction of the money.
[1] https://velvetshark.com/til/til-smartest-bears-dumbest-touri...
[2] https://www.sapiens.org/language/world-languages-counting-me...
- I get automating most of the interaction but giving the LLM rights to actually grant strangers access to accounts is insane
- A difficult problem domain, yes... so where was the staged rollout? The penetration testing? Why did it take so long to disable the bot after reports of the exploit surfaced? etc.
- You don't need an llm or a human to handle 99% of account recovery tickets. They're just shoving LLMs into everything because decision makers have llm psychosis because openclaw modified their calendar a few times and now think they live in star trek.
- People were reporting their accounts were being taken over with proper 2fa. Everyone had wondered how they hackers could take over accounts with little information, people were saying "inside job."
This is exactly the stupid explanation I expected. Your privacy and security. Meta. Serious Business.
- Has the data surfaced somewhere? A lot of IG accounts are private by choice, and this kind of data, if surfaced publicly, could have devastating privacy violations. People share all kinds of stuff on there, a lot of it not meant for public consumption. I'm not wanting a debate on "well you shouldn't put anything private on Facebook's servers or the internet blah blah blah". I'm just curious if the actual contents of the hack have been surfaced.
- And who said cameras linked to Meta in their glasses were a good idea?
- I got a suspicious password reset request email today from Meta but it landed in my inbox. Luckily I have MFA and after checking audit logs inside IG upon logging in, I did not see anything suspicious.
- 2FA did not help according to the primary finding
- In that case it sounds like the last waves of malicious reset attempts happened after the patch was put in place
- You only have to look at both the ridiculiously terrible "Q&A chatbot" that is in FaceBook under some posts (do they still have this?) and the fact that their system can't tell the difference between an inappropriate and a non-inappropriate comment most of the time to understand just how far behind Meta is in AI...
- Move fast and break things.
- > as well as the ability to access the person's posts, direct messages
god dang!! we are going to see some juicy stuff
- Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot
- Is there a way to check if I was affected? Does Meta know who was affected?
- If this was a bank that had zero humans and the AI chatbot was abused to hand over sensitive information about their customers which led to this disaster, people would never trust their bank ever again and leave.
Meta believes that they can vibe-code their reputation down the drain by removing humans in the loop.
Applying a technical solution to a social problem almost always ends in disasters like this.
Reputation can’t be vibe-coded.
- Meta's brand is already toxic. Idk if there's much to lose there.
- Buying more. The vibe here is getting close to 2021
- The AI passed the Turing Test by becoming the world's most trusting customer service rep.
- I want to hacke one instgram account
- Meta is clearly staying true to their ethos. “Move fast and break things”, “ask for forgiveness, not permission”, “have your security researcher delete their own email email by accident and then refuse to learn anything and use that same system to manage user accounts”.
- Just.me_samiyy hacked
- Where is the security left now?
- how on earth a password reset API would take both email address and account id as parameters? The chat bot is fine. I bet it's the API written by AI the issue
- "abusing" by using it's built in insecurity to do insecure things.
It's like, people abusing an open door. "Guys, just because we left the door open to your bedroom doesn't mean we're responsible".
God can only hope this is a business ending lawsuit.
- It won’t be.
also this is more like them leaving the keys in the door, then someone comes along, uses the keys, and steals all your stuff.
truthfully, no equipment is actually defective in this scenario eh?
- If we're nitpicking metaphors I think it's more accurate to say it's like they were taking requests to rekey the lock on your door.
- > God can only hope this is a business ending lawsuit.
You realize this is the company that enabled a genocide and got away with it? Not to mention accelerating teenager suicides with full knowledge.
- why epse would i invoke a mythical diety
- Are we winning yet?
- Is there a tl;dr? are these people getting their accounts back?
- By "abusing" they mean "using"
- No, it's still abuse. Just like it's still stealing even if I left my front door unlocked.
- The appropriate metaphor would rather be your landlord deciding to renovate the entire back wall of your apartment/house to make it an open-air design.
People coming in from the street to hang out and rifle through your belongings would still be "abusing" the system according to the law, but it's hard to not consider the landlord somewhat responsible.
- It's not stealing if you give it to me, regardless of your door
- How do business owners hire people from Meta knowing these types of "bugs" get deployed with a shrug? Meta will survive them. Their business might not.
- Probably some product manager pushed back on security considerations raised by engineers.
- Silicon Valley’s finest
- https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28202858-meta-ai-ag-...
https://www.maine.gov/agviewer/content/ag/985235c7-cb95-4be2...
- > Date(s) Breach Occured: 04/17/2026
> Date Breach Discovered: 05-31-2026
- I’m guessing they have no functional human support for the people who had their accounts stolen. I get the impression Meta didn’t know this was happening until they were contacted by the media.
- > no functional human support
I've seen some reporting saying exactly that. [0]
It might be a "first-world problem", but having an account lost without appeal can justly be labeled "traumatic", especially if post-COVID it represents a majority of your social (or para-social) life.
[0] https://www.404media.co/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai-to-give...
- > It might be a "first-world problem", but having an account lost without appeal can justly be labeled "traumatic", especially if post-COVID it represents a majority of your social (or para-social) life.
Also possibly illegal under GDPR section 22.
- Just AI Slop doing AI Slop things
- Yet another reminder that most of these chatbots get shipped way before they're ready. Loud marketing, security treated as an afterthought, all to ride the AI hype. LLMs open up a whole new attack surface and a lot of teams still treat prompt injection like a fun edge case. This is what happens when you ship the demo instead of the product.
- Imagine how much $ ppl could have made hijacking famous accounts to promote crypto or other crap. I wonder how often this happened.
666 points by speckx 23 hours ago | 238 comments