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Comment by MrDunham | Hacker News Reader

So… this will be a useless answer for most and incredibly helpful for a few.

The best solution is to know, or befriend, someone who works at Facebook (you’re in the right forum to meet people).

The short: FB has an internal team dedicated to helping friends of employees fix account issues and they work very quickly.

I know, and have personally used, this service a few times and it’s super useful. (Sadly I don’t work for the company so I’m not helpful here.)

So if you know a FB/Meta employee, contact them about the “oops” team.

If you don’t know anyone, there’s a chance someone here could help (it is extra work for them and they’re putting their reputation on the line so think about how you can show/prove you’re a good actor.)

I’m going to guess that this isn’t helpful to your situation right now but perhaps you can use this info to find someone who can help. Good luck!

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To me the most interesting part about this is the fact they know their platform causes enough issues without sufficient means of remedy as to need a dedicated team for their own people. If they had to eat their own dogfood instead, things would get fixed.

> If they had to eat their own dogfood instead, things would get fixed.

I assume they are using their own product. At FAANG size, these bad cases are probably just noise at best if you only look at the big picture. A hundred people losing access to their facebook account every week week is nothing if you have billions of users. So I guess it just doesn't happen to employees enough to appear to be a problem. And if it does, it's so easy to fix since you are facebook, that it doesn't even occur to most that this might be a very different experience for normal people. Sadly, a few employees caring and and maybe even occasionally raising their voice about this internally isn't enough. It's great they volunteer to help out, but as GP says, it doesn't scale and only works as long as it's a secret trick for people who know someone...

I've lost my YouTube account I used in college in another stupid fashion that should be easy to recover (or rather, verify that it's mine) if someone with half a brain looked at the issue, but we all know how easy it is to talk to a human at Google if you have problems with a non-payed account there, so I didn't even bother trying. Cousin of mine doesn't remember the email account she used when she registered her Minecraft account (9 years ago, at age 13). I payed for that account. I still have the PayPal Transaction ID, exact date of purchase, Account Name and UUID. They should be able to verify the account wasn't logged into for years. Nope, not enough. Well at least you could actually talk to a human there...

"Eating your own dogfood" in this context is clearly referring to employees and friends of employees going through exactly the same processes to get their accounts fixed and restored as unconnected users would.

I did this recently for a neighbor whose account was hacked. I was able to sit down with her in person and go through the steps and fill out the form with her, and it was resolved in a day. It felt nice to be able to help someone so directly given how indirect my work usually is. It makes me think that a job in customer support would probably be pleasant if you could consistently fix people's problems (which probably does not describe most customer support jobs). I'd do it again with someone in person, but I don't really feel comfortable doing it over the internet... you really are supposed to be vouching for this person.

The impression I got from training is: "DO NOT EVER TRY TO FIX PROBLEMS ON YOUR OWN. DO NOT EVER ACCESS A SYSTEM ON BEHALF OF FRIENDS OR FAMILY. YOU WILL BE FIRED. And if you ever get anxious and consider breaking those rules, you don't have to because there's an internal system to help you resolve these issues."

(I started posting this in my own name, but I don't like telling people "no" and I'm worried this invites requests...)

Smart to use a throwaway. And I personally know someone who violated the “don’t access systems” rule. They were very well liked and they were very quickly fired.

I was wondering what the purpose of the oops team was beyond making employees’ lives a little easier. Makes sense that they would set it up as a way to avoid having devs trying to fix friend’s/family member’s problems and risk private info/PII running amok

a friend of mine is a security guard at Facebook and I asked her if she knew how to unlock my years-ago hacked account and she told me tons of people ask her the same thing and that there's nothing that can be done about it. perhaps it's different if it's a developer instead?

A physical security guard (as opposed to someone in Facebook security)?

I wouldn't expect a security guard to know much besides physical security protocols. They wouldn't be privy to anything around user accounts.

yes, but I thought she'd know someone who'd know someone or something like that. I was just slightly amused that I wasn't the first person to ask.

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