Code Oh Code

I needed Facebook more than I thought

My first instinctive reaction to losing Facebook was the very generation-typical “meh”. I mean who NEEDS Facebook anyway, right? I managed to cope with the first 18 years of my life without it. No biggie, carry on with life as normal. I was going out that night anyway, it makes a great pub story and I like being the centre of attention. I could drown my sorrows and amuse my friends. If anything, not being on Facebook seemed great for a while.

It was time to leave and then it hit me. Earlier on that day there had been an update to the Facebook page for the event I was attending, a change of location. Instinctively I logged into Facebook and saw that “Your account has been disabled message” again. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go and I couldn’t check Facebook to find out either.



No worries, I have the event stored in a calendar on my Windows Phone. I flicked open to my calendar and looked for the appointment and it wasn’t there. The calendar was syncing with Facebook and when my account became disabled, for security reasons, all of my Facebook events were removed from my calendar. Shit.

Not a problem, I’ll phone Russell, he was organising the event so could tell me where to go. I searched for Russell’s number in my contacts and… no results, he’d vanished. James? He was there as an email address and a Twitter handle but no phone number. Sean? Same again. My phone’s contacts had been syncing with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but not actually saving any data to the phone or Exchange. All of the numbers were being pulled in from Facebook and without a Facebook account, I didn’t have any Facebook friends and no numbers to pull in. Fuck.

Luckily my text messages were still safe, I wasn’t completely lost. I found an old text thread with Russell, phoned him and added the number as a new contact to my phone. I was saved for the evening and it turned out not to be quite the disaster I feared, but it started to dawn on me just how much I’d grown to rely on one platform.

I run an event and an event video company. I manage their Facebook Pages and Events, only I can’t do that anymore. The Pages and Events are still there thankfully (unlike my personal account, photos and all of the data associated with those), however I can no longer access them. My business partners still have access, but I do not. An annoying blip, but something I guess we can work with, they’re going to have to take on my Facebook responsibilities.

More than just a profile

Netflix, Spotify, Foursquare and a whole plethora of other apps and services that I use with Facebook authentication are now off limits to me. Some of them have additional ways to log in to their services and the support teams of a few others have managed to help me out too. Not all hope lost there.
Losing my phone contacts, calendar appointments and app logins to other services were all inconveniences, but they were things I could fix immediately and find other ways around, minor stuff.

Losing my archive of memories, my messages, my photos, my groups, my Pages, my Events, anything I actually RELY on Facebook for though is infuriating. There’s no way to get this information out of Facebook once your account has been disabled, it’s all ‘gone’.

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