Facebook caused a few issues for internet users after an Engineer accidentally blocked the Image Sharing site, Imgur. Not too many people seemed to notice, but then on Reddit, someone posted about it saying that Facebook had decided to block Imgur. Reddit is used by a large majority of Facebook users, so it was a good idea for the engineer who made the mistake to personally make a post in the Reddit thread that read the following:

Hey folks – so this is actually my fault. Literally, I’m the guy who accidentally blocked imgur for a brief period of time today. I’m really sorry.

Some background: I’m an engineer who works on the system we use for catching malicious URLs. In the process of dealing with a bad URL that our automated defenses didn’t catch, I ran into a rare bug that caused us to incorrectly block some legitimate URLs for a brief time. Right after I figured that out and removed the bad data, I reworked the UI so no one will get bit by the same issue in the future.

As a form of apology that I’m sure is insufficient, here is a picture of my dog dressed up for the 4th of July: http://imgur.com/pR4mR .

I think this is really good, and not just because Facebook is such a large company and it hard to speak with anybody who works there, but also because it is polite and good manners to do what he did, and let people know what the issue was and how it came about. The issue has now been solved, and a new popular thread on Reddit has come up in the Best Of, stating that it was really good PR what Facebook did to make up for this error. Imgur didn’t even seem to notice.

The picture of the dog is probably the best bit, especially considering it is posted on Imgur. Here is the new famous dog.