A turkey sandwich went viral during Facebook glitch, here’s why

A Facebook glitch on Wednesday24 August sent celebrity fan page posts to the top of users’ newsfeeds. Instead of seeing posts from family and friends, posts to famous figures like Emma Watson and Kim Kardashian circulated like crazy.

The issue – now resolved – occurred between 7:00 and 9:00 BST, when a ‘configuration change’ was scheduled to take place on the popular social media site.

A turkey spam-wich?

Some users decided to have fun with the glitch and circulate memes, knowing they would be viewed by an even wider audience than usual.

According to The Verge, one of the most popular memes was a picture of a turkey sandwich. A caption read:

If you see this share it to another celebrities Facebook page keep the turkey sandwich moving.

The sandwich meme – perhaps better known as spam-wich – was viewable by any person who followed the celebrity whose page it was posted on. So, if you followed Emma Watson and the meme had been posted to her timeline by another user, it would show up on your newsfeed. Likewise, if you followed five celebrities whose pages had been spam-wiched, you would see five servings of turkey on your newsfeed.

Service concerns

The spam-wich incident brought about anxiety for Facebook users who feared the platform might have been hacked.

According to BBC, concerns about Facebook unavailability have risen since its 6-hour outage last October. During that time, all apps run by Facebook’s parent company, Meta – including Whatsapp and Instragram – shut down.

Other users, however, decided to take advantage of the spam-wich’s wide reach and posted Paypal links and GoFundMe promotions to celebrity pages instead.

Now that Meta has apologized ‘for any inconvenience’ caused and resolved the issue ‘as quickly as possible’, the turkey sandwich is but a meme.

I think we can all agree that if one good thing came out of the Facebook glitch, it is the legacy of the turkey sandwich.

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