Facebook lost some data

I’m not sure how widespread this was, but I got an email from Facebook saying:

Subject: Please reset your email notification settings.

Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

And on the Facebook home page, this appears at the top:

Apparently, it’s quite widespread, but that’s only amongst people who have written about it in blogs, etc.

No matter how widespread it is, it’s a pretty huge stuff up. They lost a lot of data. Presumably they underwent a rather large data migration. And it must be easier for them to ask users to redo their settings rather than to restore them from a backup.

But is the bad PR worth it? If they are this careless with email settings (which could actually have some effect under anti-spam legislation – if you’ve already opted out of some types of communication and they start sending it again, even despite this notification, they could be in trouble), who’s to say they aren’t going to be this careless about things like advertising payments?