Facebook has rectified a glitch in its notification system which bombarded users with birthday reminders for the last few weeks.
Normally, Facebook sends one reminder notification per birthday to only those users who have chosen to receive the notification through mail. But over the last few weeks, some users have reported a massive increase in notifications from the social network reminding them to log in and wish a happy birthday.
While a lot of users assumed the change was deliberate, or was a form of user experience testing, it was apparently a bug that resulted in numerous notifications.
A Facebook representative confirmed in a statement to Slate that the bug, which has now been fixed, resulted in users who had never signed up to email notifications for birthdays still incorrectly being sent the notifications.
Users who don’t want birthday reminders to pop up every day can easily turn the feature off with just a few clicks. To do so, head to the Settings menu, click on the Notifications tab and then next to Birthdays, click the Edit button and click off.
In related news, the social networking giant is currently testing a new feature which will let users search for websites and articles within the app and link them to their status updates.
