Archives 5 October 2018

Until just a few days ago, some Facebook users could not delete their accounts — the option to do so simply didn’t work. After VentureBeat reached out to Facebook regarding the issue, an engineer was able to squash the bug.

Two weeks ago, I got an email from a VentureBeat reader who couldn’t delete his Facebook account. He claimed there were others also having issues — no matter what they tried, they simply could not delete Facebook. I didn’t believe him at first. […] I did my due diligence. The least I could do was help him delete his account. Upon request, the reader was gracious enough to let me log into his Facebook account so I could see for myself. No matter what I tried, and regardless of which browser I used, the Facebook help page for deleting your account would not load when logged into his account.

The reporter contacted a Facebook spokesperson, who after looking into the matter concluded that a bug prevented some people with “a large number of posts” from deleting their accounts. Facebook says it has resolved the issue.

Facebook has increased the pending time to process a deletion request to 30 days, a 16-day increase over the previous 14.

Is there a reason to believe that Facebook’s also making this change because more people are deleting their accounts? The movement [sic] has certainly gotten a lot of attention in recent months, with WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton encouraging his nearly 43,000 Twitter followers in March to delete Facebook.

But Facebook’s last earnings report doesn’t give much indication that it is — the number of daily active users in the U.S. and Canada stayed flat, and even increased in Asia. The number of DAUs in Europe dropped by 4 million, but Facebook executives indicated that they believed that was mostly due to GDPR. Facebook followers will have to wait until the company’s next earnings report on October 30 to see if the dip in Europe DAUs is part of a continuing trend.

For those who want to delete Facebook and are willing to wait out 30 days, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do so.