Dear Facebook, Kindly Fix the White Screen of Death Error

Written by asharjamil | Published 2018/07/23
Tech Story Tags: social-media | facebook | facebook-bug-bounty | facebook-marketing | tech-open-letter

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

Why Facebook seriously needs to upgrade its customer support.

Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world with 2.2 billion monthly active users. Nowadays, everyone has a Facebook account, from celebrities to politicians to probably even your grandmother and they spend more time on it than ever before.

Although using Facebook is very easy-peasy and complaint free but occasionally users face issues which can be resolved by going through the Facebook Help Center forum. However, if the problem encountered is not at user-end and more from the server side. Then what? How will you fix that?

The answer is you can’t!

Facebook White Screen of Death

Recently I came across an error which makes your Facebook account inaccessible on both your mobile phone and computer. This strange error is called Facebook White Screen of Death.

Facebook White Screen of Death

Facebook’s White Screen of Death is a technical issue where you get a blank white page and the user cannot perform any operation on the website. Also, sometimes you get the message “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can”. However, the account works on mobile application and other people can see your profile.

If you are experiencing this problem then sad news that there is no fix to it.

You maybe thinking that this is a new issue that Facebook isn’t aware of. Sadly, this problem has been surfaced on Facebook several years ago, and I’ve reported the issue myself without getting any answer:

Cause of this Error

After some research, I have found that this error is actually a server-side issue from Facebook which has something to do with their database. And it requires re-indexing of your profile.

Possible Fixes

Here is a list of the things you can try. These didn’t work for me.

  1. Try switching to different browsers.
  2. Clear up your past history, cookies, and cache.
  3. Change your password.
  4. Force log out and try to log in again.
  5. Try to log in through another computer.
  6. Try to log in through your mobile.
  7. Try to log in using Facebook beta page.
  8. Try to log in using Facebook business page.
  9. Install a Facebook application on the desktop.
  10. Disable all antivirus programs.

There is a very high probability that the above tips will not fix the issue but still they are worth trying.

The last thing you can do is, go to Facebook help community and post this issue and wait for a miracle.

Dear Facebook

Your customer support is extremely poor, especially when it comes to a business user. I understand that Facebook has a large number of active customers and if they offer telephone or email support they would be overloaded with support requests, but anyhow Facebook certainly need a better system for customer support!

Some recommendations to Facebook:

  1. Introduce a dedicated support for business users who use Facebook advertising account. This includes assistance on telephone and email.
  2. Immediately reply to common error questions such as White Screen of Death on Facebook Help Community.
  3. Once error resolved, alert the user through email.
  4. Lastly, please let us know that you’re aware of the issue and will address it. I’ll happily update this article if you DM me at @asharjamil on Twitter.

Being an advertiser on Facebook, I have to manage advertising accounts of my clients on daily basis. If my account goes blank then it can jeopardize my business.

At the time of writing, Facebook finally fixed my profile. It took Facebook a week to resolve this issue. No answer was received to my posted question on the Help Center. I still have no idea how it got fixed. I hope Facebook take notice of this issue permanently.

Dear reader — please support me in escalating this message to Facebook:

Clap for this Medium Post below.

Tweet this article to https://twitter.com/facebook with the hashtag #UpgradeCustomerSupport.

Share this post with your friends.

Please let me know if you have any other ideas on how to escalate this issue, and I’d love to join forces to get this issue resolved ASAP.


Published by HackerNoon on 2018/07/23