And Facebook is a perfect example of customer-service hell in which once one has lost one’s account, there’s no way to talk to a person who can get this unfucked.
What happened? As best as I can figure, someone attempted to hack my 2-factor authentication last night while I slept – I woke up to a text message from Facebook with a 2-factor authentication code.
What did Facebook do? When I went to check, I was logged out of Facebook on all devices, and I was told that my account was suspended for “not following their rules”:
Is this possible? No. Since I rarely post, I’m pretty circumspect, and I primarily use it for Messenger to talk to a few old friends, I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t doing anything that violated community standards.
And I sure didn’t while I was sleeping.
Is there a way to fix this? No. I tried to follow their procedures, only to find I didn’t have a linked auth.oculus.com account, because I didn’t have an Oculus. And once you do create such an account, there is no mechanism to appeal a suspension – only this reference in the help files:
But, probably because these folks were trying to hack my account, they likely mucked with the email, so I never got an email from Meta about this – not even in my spam folder.
So the hackers did something bad with your account? Maybe? I can’t tell. So, the next attempt is to report the account as compromised. There is a way to do that, which takes you to the following page:
But, since the hackers were likely messing with two-factor authentication and trying to break in to the account, we get back to the temporarily blocked state you have above:
Are you sure you were hacked? Pretty sure. The text came in at 2:23am, after I was already asleep.
As a last ditch effort, I remembered I had an open Facebook tab, so I tried to go screenshot it. It quickly logged out, but I got to see, very briefly, my old Facebook page, and could see the last activity was merely me using Messenger to talk to friends.
How could this be fixed? Easily. This is the kind of thing that a customer service representative, looking at the account, can resolve in five minutes flat over chat, just by looking at the calm history followed by a spike of hacked traffic. And it’s the responsible thing to do for your customers.
But Facebook doesn’t provide access for this – apparently except for business accounts. And, while I’m not happy with a lot of stuff Elon did at Twitter, this makes me more inclined to use services you pay for. X, in contrast, makes it very easy to appeal a decision via an easily findable and accessible form:
https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/suspended-x-accounts
The bottom line? Someone hacked me while I slept, and a decade plus of Facebook is gone – principally because Meta does not provide basic tools for customer support.
Welp, nothing to do but call Zuck out about it on Xitter …
-the Centaur
UPDATE: There are forums, where people are reporting this issue, and customer support representatives for the Meta Quest are responding. Cross your fingers. But it wasn’t at all obvious that this is a solution! We’re getting help from people who aren’t even support staff for the same product.
UPDATE UPDATE: Nope, nevermind, they just redirect you back to the Facebook help center, which as I already confirmed, can’t help you.
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Apparently Facebook has someone on Twitter who monitors for just this sort of thing. That is an unorthodox solution, but I’ve heard of the same thing at the Google. I’ll reach out; we’ll see. Cross yo fingies ….
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Apparently those people on Twitter are not affiliated with Facebook – there’s a huge list people recommending various peeps as people who “helped me” and when you look at those users they don’t appear to be affiliated with Facebook. So, no.
