Facebook Lockout Users who report fake/scam accounts locked out

People who are just trying to be good citizens of Facebookland, by reporting fake accounts set up by, say, a scammer pretending to be their dead granny, are being locked out of their own accounts by what looks like a glitch in Facebook’s reporting function.

Users frustrated at the lockouts had taken to Twitter to get Facebook’s attention with the hashtag #FacebookLockout. Some users said that for up to a month or more, there had been a Catch-22 loop, where reporting a scam account led to Facebook freezing the reporting user’s account, presenting them with a request to confirm their ID, and then failing to upload their ID.

2/ The #FacebookLockout affects #facebook, @FBBusiness, @Instagram Ads, and 3rd party Facebook Authentication. All… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

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Cory Comer (@corywcomer) October 14, 2019

Cory Comer, a marketing professional, said that he was locked out of his account for a week, with no help from Facebook. He told Mashable that nobody at his company could access its official Facebook page, either, given that Comer’s personal profile was connected to that of his business.

Comer has since gotten his account back, but he said that he’s talked to users who’ve been locked out of their Facebook accounts now for a month.