Facebook Messenger Kids Has A Bug That Cancels The Point Of The Whole App

One of the features of Facebook’s Messenger for Kids is that it prevents the user from chatting with unapproved contacts. This means that kids who use the app will only get to chat with people that they know and approved by their parents, thus preventing strangers from getting in touch with your kids.

However, it appears that a recent bug in the app has kind of negated the entire point of the app in the first place. This comes in the form of a design flaw in which kids can be added into a group chat by a friend which contains members that might not have been approved by their parents.

In an alert that parents are receiving from Facebook, it reads, “We found a technical error that allowed [CHILD]’s friend [FRIEND] to create a group chat with [CHILD] and one or more of [FRIEND]’s parent-approved friends. We want you to know that we’ve turned off this group chat and are making sure that group chats like this won’t be allowed in the future.”

It is unclear how long this bug has been around, but the group chat feature for Messenger Kids was introduced in December 2017, it could have been since then. Hopefully Facebook will come up with a fix for it, but until then, the affected chats have since been disabled.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Apps, Facebook, messenger