Something about this bug makes me just desperately want to close it as "worksforme", but I'm speaking as a facebook user rather than a facebook developer :-)
not surprising really, I have often written software, returned a decade later and had to unravel why it does what it does, even though I am one person and it's just a few thousand lines of code, I can well imagine the FB system is too complex for any individual to inspect, and if the record keeping and documentation on the whys as well as the hows is incomplete then we are we are...
I find it extremely hard to believe that this was a bug. Obviously without knowing FBs internals we'll never know, but why you'd write software that would have everything wired up together, your SMS notification service has the ability to post notifications on your behalf? I'm not buying it.
This was either poor engineers, or they're lying. With the quality stuff FB put out (React, Jester, etc), I find the former to be hard to accept.
I'd find it more believable if this wasn't a bug, but something behind a feature toggle that they didn't intend to push live just yet.
Rather, from observation, I think most people are used to not understanding what any of their software is doing and to seeing what looks like random, unpredictable, or otherwise weird behavior from it constantly, so Facebook's not unusual from their perspective.
That's just bs engineering and even shittier way of communicating this technical incompetency to the user. Facebook is like the Russia of tech. Casual, convenient incompetency. Which is not incompetency at all, just evil.
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