Our Facebook page has been hacked, and it’s impossible to get it back (Updated)

Update:We’re back! We were finally able to get hold of someone at Facebook and get our Facebook page back. Many thanks to everyone who tried to help and offered support. We contacted someone at Facebook through a reader in Chicago, who happens to work for a big newspaper. He had a contact in Facebook’s media team and called her up. Within minutes I received an email asking for details, and two minutes after that it was fixed. In fact, it was shocking how quickly the situation was reversed, given that we’d been wrestling with it for almost 24 hours — many thanks to the Facebook insider who fixed the problem for us. However, my thesis still holds — Facebook is a locked vault. If you don’t know someone who knows someone who works there, you’re SOL. Oh, and no word on what happened. I asked them, but no reply as yet.

Much to our horror, Cult of Mac’s Facebook page got hacked Monday and turned into a spam site. The hackers have locked us out and we’re finding it impossible to regain control.

We’re trying desperately to contact Facebook, but the company offers no customer support whatsoever. There are no online submission forms, no support email addresses, and the phone automatically hangs up on you if you call. It’s impossible to raise a human being over there.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. But during this ongoing nightmare, I’ve discovered something important about Facebook and the kind of tech companies it represents.

In the last 18 hours or so, I’ve discovered that Facebook is an impenetrable castle. The company built a trendy new open-plan office in Menlo Park, California, but it’s constructed a giant moat cutting off any contact — and I mean any contact at all — from its users and customers.

I spent hours Monday night trying to figure out how to regain control of Cult of Mac’s Facebook page, but Facebook just sent me in nightmarish loops.

If you have a problem, Facebook directs you to its Help pages, which are comically Kafkaesque. The pages ask you a series of questions that lead nowhere. The only concrete help is getting you to change your password, but after you do that, you get looped around to the beginning again.

The problem of being locked out of a page isn’t addressed. And once I discovered that, I could go no further. I tried calling the company switchboard, but it directed me back to the online Help pages and then hung up on me!

My fury was burning like a thousand young stars, but I was utterly powerless to do anything.

I sent emails to the catchall email for the company’s PR department. Then I started looking up individual staffers to contact. I’ve had some interaction with Facebook’s media relations department in the past, so I sent a half-dozen messages. One person replied and said they’d pass my message to the right folks. I should expect to hear back in “the next day or so,” she said.

Let’s hope. But in the meantime, a lot of damage is being done.

Since the page was taken over sometime Monday afternoon, it’s been posting dozens of spammy and offensive stories that lead to a couple of different sites. (They seem to be owned by an Australian company called WLK Holdings Pty Ltd.)

Our page has about 160,000 followers and is an important outlet for us. It drives significant traffic to the Cult of Mac website, and is an effective way to reach and interact with readers.

All of the legit editors of the page have been removed. No one is able to log in to the page.

We have no idea how our page was hacked and taken over. It might have been through Facebook, or perhaps a plugin used to post stories to the network. I recently changed my Facebook password (using 1Password; it’s 21 characters long) and turned on two-factor authentication.

Our deals partner, StackSocial, was also hacked. The breaches are obviously related, but we don’t know how.

There is one Facebook page where you can submit feedback, but it explicitly says you’re wasting your time: “Thanks for taking the time to give us feedback,” the page says. “We don’t typically respond to feedback emails, but we’re reviewing them.”

Thanks for nothing, Mark Zuckerberg!

Thanks for nothing, Mark Zuckerberg! The arrogance and elitism is breathtaking.

This is all important because of Facebook’s incredible reach and power. Like AOL back in the day, Facebook has become the de facto internet for many. My kids, for example, are barely aware there’s a wider internet outside Facebook. Everything they do and all the media they consume comes through the social network.

And yet Facebook is unanswerable to anyone. Facebook does what it likes, and customers and users have no redress.

Facebook and the new facelessness

Facebook is emblematic of a lot of new tech companies that seem to be in contempt of their users. Back in the day, I thought Google was bad, but the new generation of tech companies is much worse. They’ve erected giant, impenetrable walls between themselves and the customers whose data nourishes their networks.

A lot of people say Apple is arrogant. But if you have a problem with an Apple product, you can get a human on the phone in minutes — or head to the nearest Genius Bar for some face-to-face aid.

Facebook’s tech support, on the other hand, might as well be run by HAL-9000. The generic help pages offer no real support for people who’s businesses or identities have been hijacked.

For a social network that built its financial empire on easy and instantaneous communication, Facebook’s approach to customer service is completely unacceptable.

Where’s the “do not like” button?

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.

Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.

He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.

Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.

Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.

Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.

Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.

Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.

Leander is an expert on:

Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods

Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.

He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.

Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.

You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.