> "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.
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.
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'"
> 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.
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?
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.
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'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.
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 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.
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.'
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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 [...]"
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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).
Depends on the use case, but TikTok is an alternative for many of them, I would say it generally feels more like the place where interesting things are happening vs. meta properties.
...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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm not sure "worked properly" and "as intended" accurately describe this situation.
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.
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.
(Usually said jocularly when everyone is at their most upset, e.g. a vacation ruined)
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.
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. :)
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?
[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28202858-meta-ai-ag-...
> 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
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.
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.
But it’s irrelevant, outside of PR. We know at least THREE bad components to this process and they were constituent parts.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
Nobody's going to be distributing software on the internet for free if the cost of insurance alone precludes that.
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.
"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.
No bro - open source and the internet existed long before SV tech parasitism did and will exist long after.
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.
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".
The problem is when the backend function doesn't verify that the email matches the username.
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.
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.)
Unless the backend was _also_ vibe-coded, in which case it is still an AI problem.
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.
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.
Don’t read too much into it. Facebook wants to face as little accountability and keep the future class action lawsuit to a minimum.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You must live in Monaco.
Wikipedia has the United States #80.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
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.
(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... )
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.
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.
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.
Can also try here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MetaLawsuits/
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.
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 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.
[1]: https://rainermuehlhoff.de/KI-und-der-neue-Faschismus-Reclam...
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'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.
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.
The only useful reaction to this is to point and laugh.
oh no...Meta what are you doing
...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 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...
> 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.
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.
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.
This is exactly the stupid explanation I expected. Your privacy and security. Meta. Serious Business.
god dang!! we are going to see some juicy stuff
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359102
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.
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?
You realize this is the company that enabled a genocide and got away with it? Not to mention accelerating teenager suicides with full knowledge.
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.
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.
https://www.maine.gov/agviewer/content/ag/985235c7-cb95-4be2...
> Date Breach Discovered: 05-31-2026
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...
Also possibly illegal under GDPR section 22.