Facebook is experiencing a strange error.

Strange characters appeared right below the account name. Photo: Tuan Anh .

On the morning of May 25th, many Facebook users in Vietnam were surprised to report a user interface error. Specifically, instead of displaying the posting time of posts or comments in the usual way (such as a few seconds ago, 2 hours ago), the platform showed a long, jumbled string of alphanumeric characters, resembling coded messages.

According to observations, this issue began appearing sporadically around 9 AM on May 25th. However, if you move your computer cursor to this location, the pop-up content that opens will still display the correct information about the post uploaded to the platform.

This bug appeared on both the personal pages of ordinary users and large Fanpages or verified accounts. The incident quickly attracted attention and became a topic of discussion in many technology groups.

Some users jokingly said they needed a "decryption algorithm" just to know when a post was published. Others worried it could be a sign of account compromise or malware infection on their device.

Tri Thức - Znews noted that this display error occurred inconsistently after a quick survey of several users at the time. Most users experiencing the error were accessing Facebook via a web browser on a computer, while those using the app on mobile devices appeared unaffected.

Technical experts believe this is simply an issue related to Meta's front-end (user interface) server system, and not a security vulnerability or a sign of a hacker attack. For some reason, the translation process in the browser failed, causing the system to display the raw, original string of characters.

This isn't the first time Facebook has experienced such display errors. A similar incident occurred most recently in mid-April, and the site returned to normal within a day. In December 2024, DownDetector, a platform that tracks outages or connection errors of social networks and online services, recorded numerous reports related to Facebook from users worldwide, not just in Vietnam.

In the past, Meta has experienced numerous interface display errors. Users have encountered instances of the "Like" button disappearing, comment boxes being repeated, or images not displaying at the correct size.

As of now, Meta has not issued any official comment regarding this timestamp encryption bug. Typically, for software bugs that do not affect core data, the platform's engineering team will automatically detect them and silently release a patch within a few hours to a few days.