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“Many Facebook users woke up to a glitch on their news feeds which showed various comments that other users had posted on celebrity pages. The company has now confirmed this was due to a ‘configuration change’ which has now been fixed.

This is the latest example of a serious IT issue that was caused by human error after Facebook was impacted by a separate incident in October last year that was also caused by a staff slip-up. The weakest link in IT and cybersecurity is always likely to be the human element, but there are measures that can be taken to minimise the impact of these potentially damaging mistakes. The main one is for organisations to boost their levels of cyber hygiene, which refers to a set of practices that organisations and individuals perform regularly to maintain the health and security of users, devices, networks and data. Important aspects of cyber hygiene that can avoid glitches and downtime include patching and having visibility of all devices connected to the organisation’s network so that any vulnerable ones can be fixed or removed. Measures like these offer no guarantee of avoiding any costly incidents, but they certainly reduce the chances of them happening and the impact they have.

This Facebook issue is surfacing shortly after former Twitter executive Peiter Zatko cited several security problems with the platform and employee devices. Therefore, I expect the high level of attention to continue being placed on the practices of social media companies in regards to IT management and security. By focusing on boosting cyber hygiene and demonstrating these efforts to the public and government, trust can be built. This is important for social media companies because it directly influences a key goal that many of them share – growing the number of users.”