Trillions of Posts Go Dark on Facebook – Here's Your Flashlight
My Pet Project 'Who Posted What' Still Remembers What You Did Last Summer
Facebook has apparently 'glitched' its way into making trillions of posts and photos completely unsearchable. We are now on day two of 'The Great Facebook Darkness of 2025’. (If you need a light, check Who Posted What. )
No major tech site has reported about the outage yet, and let's hope they never have to. It could be a temporary glitch that's solved by the time you read this. But if history teaches us anything about Facebook's "temporary glitches," it's that they have a funny way of becoming permanent features. Remember when the chronological timeline was just "temporarily" replaced by the algorithm?
Even before this "glitch," Facebook's search was about as precise as a blindfolded surgeon. You could never search for posts from a specific date, date range, or even a particular month. The best you got was filtering by year, like some kind of digital archaeologist who only owns an ice shovel. Want to find what people said on January 6th specifically? Too bad, here's everything from 2021, good luck scrolling!
That's exactly why I made 'Who Posted What' in the first place—to fix Facebook's deliberately useless search. I just wanted to find posts from specific dates without drowning in irrelevant noise. Now, by pure accident, it's become a backup plan to find ANY post at all, because Meta decided to make their already-terrible search disappear. For the nerds who want even more, check Graph Tips. I have no plan B for photo search yet.
BBC investigator Paul Myers tipped me about the outage today and thanked me for the emergency backup. Which honestly caught me completely off guard.
I had no idea there was an outage—I was just sitting here, maintaining my little search tool that I built because Facebook's date search was garbage, when suddenly I'm getting even more messages thanking me for "saving the day." It's like being told you're a hero for having a flashlight in your drawer when you didn't even know the power went out.
Why do you need a Facebook search as investigator? For serious researchers, it's vital to track when discussions about the dementia treatment aducanumab started circulating way before FDA approval. Or verify if that viral demonstration actually happened when claimed, or was recycled footage from 2019. Or simply check if anyone was seriously discussing "murder hornets" before we collectively decided that was our May 2020 crisis.
With 'Who Posted What,' you can actually search for posts from a specific day, month, or custom date range. Want every post about "vaccine side effects" from exactly March 15, 2021? Need to track how "inflation is transitory" aged from June to December 2021? Looking for all posts from your local mayor about "crime rates" but only from the week before elections? Child's play.
Video search is possible by replacing the word posts for videos after you run a search with the tool. I have no fix for photos yet.
While we wait for Meta to "fix" this "glitch," have fun with my flashlight - you can only use it on a desktop and must be logged in into Facebook first. Remember: somewhere in those trillion missing posts is the evidence that your conspiracy theorist uncle once shared a Snopes article, your ex admitted they were wrong about cryptocurrency being "the future of money," and Mark Zuckerberg promised that Facebook would never compromise user access to their own content.
Good thing someone kept the receipts.