A technical glitch left some Facebook users locked out of their accounts

Photo illustration (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic).

A number of Facebook users recently found themselves, out of the blue and for no apparent reason, logged out of their accounts and incapable of signing back in.

On February 24, a significant number of Facebookers took to (other) social media platforms to express their discontent over what Facebook is now calling a technical glitch, the second to plague the site in just a week.

Sometime just after 1 p.m. ET, certain Facebook users in the U.K., Western Europe, and the east coast of the U.S. were automatically logged out of their accounts. Fearing that account information might have been compromised, Facebook actually locked access and distributed a number of password reset emails to those affected by the glitch. But problematically, those resets didn't seem to work, prompting even more discontent.

In an emailed response to Digital Trends, a Facebook spokesperson noted,

"Earlier today an error in one of our systems designed to help prevent suspicious account access sent a small set of people to our account recovery flow unnecessarily. We have fixed the issue and have cleared the affected accounts from this recovery flow. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Apparently, the problem was a technical one, and not a security matter. Facebook noted that users who found themselves without access to their accounts should not worry about the safety of their profiles, and that no additional action needs to be taken.

Hopefully, this will assuage the fears of some users, who received rather odd messages on Friday, including ones that claimed Facebook had locked accounts "in order to keep your information secure," and that asked for identity verification and password resets.

In any case, it looks as though all's well that ends well, and Facebook is up and running smoothly again.