Facebook Messenger users troubled by inability to ‘unsend’

Ngoc Anh, a communications officer in Hanoi, wanted to invite her colleague to lunch on Friday, but she mistakenly texted and sent a photo to her boss.

She hurriedly pressed the command "Unsend for Everyone," but the system was unresponsive.

Users in Vietnam lodged numerous complaints about the error with Facebook on Friday, citing several embarrassing and unpleasant experiences the snafu had caused them.

"I sent a few photos to tease my friend, but I sent them to the wrong person by mistake. Because I could not unsend them, my jokes were misunderstood," said Thuy Dung, a student in Ho Chi Minh City.

The error has occurred on both the phone app and the web browser, according to users. Other app features have reportedly been working normally, including the "Remove for You" function.

On Downdetector, a website specializing in monitoring Internet problems, the number of complaints about errors on Messenger increased Friday morning.

However, 49% of the reports were related to sending messages, and few reports were about the unsend error.

According to Hoang Khang, who specializes in providing services on social networks, the unsend problem must have occurred on a relatively small scale locally in Vietnam, not globally.

As of 4:30 p.m., the error had not been fixed and the Messenger app’s developer Meta had not responded to the problem.

Messenger is one of the most popular messaging applications in Vietnam. On the App Store, the app ranks fifth among the most downloaded social networking apps.

Messenger has reached 5 billion downloads on Google Play.

Last year, services provided by Meta apps encountered a variety of frequent errors, including displaying old posts on groups and not displaying images properly.

By Saturday morning the glitch had been fixed.