For ages, you could hook up your Facebook account to Twitter, allowing you to automatically post tweets as a status update.
That feature stopped working earlier this month when Facebook made changes to its API, and as reported by TechCrunch, Facebook status updates that were crossposted from Twitter mysteriously vanished around Tuesday.
A Facebook spokesperson explained to Mashable that the deletion resulted from a Twitter administrator's request for the app to be deleted, but it's now been fixed.
"[It] resulted in content that people had cross-posted from Twitter to Facebook also being temporarily removed from people’s profiles. However, we have since restored the past content and it’s now live on people’s profiles," the statement reads.
Given that Facebook stores so much of our online conversations these days, the sudden deletions prompted complaints from users.
oh great, Facebook deleted virtually everything I posted there for over eight years, thousands of posts and every comment that came with it https://t.co/F4KtMbuyXm
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) August 29, 2018
I did Facebook's "download my data" thing to verify and yep, they've permanently deleted all prior posts made via Twitter integration, as well as all replies attached to them. About a decade of conversations with friends deleted without notice. Seriously Facebook, fuck you.
— Rod Hilton (@rodhilton) August 29, 2018
Not only is it my posts that were arbitrarily nuked, but any friends who interacted &/or commented with those posts have had that deleted as well with absolutely no warning or notice from Facebook whatsoever.
— Joshua Meadows (@joshuameadows) August 29, 2018
@facebook I used the Twitter for Facebook app for years, and I realize it's not working and isn't going to. But I just discovered all the Facebook updates it put have been deleted and dissappeared from my timeline! Is there a way to retrieve this?
— Omer Lev (@omerlev) August 26, 2018
Over the past year, Facebook has tightened up its developer policies following the well-publicised Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the personal data of approximately 87 million users were improperly used.
Facebook announced in April that it would stop allowing third parties to directly publish posts to the platform by Aug. 1, affecting roughly 60,000 apps.