My girlfriend just acquired a strange bug with sending private messages in Facebook. Firstly, she tries to send a normal private message like so:

And then, it sends it to some completely random person that she’s not even friends with.

So much for "private" messages.

I tested it in a different browser on a different computer, and it still does the same thing, so it’s almost definitely a server-side problem. I also tested it on my account, but it isn’t happening to me.

When she sends a message to me, it gets sent to Chris Hughes who is a co-founder of Facebook! I wonder if that’s a coincidence. When she sends a message to her friend Rhi, it gets sent to another Harvard alumni named “Zach”. It doesn’t appear to be random, because the same intended recipient always produces the same actual (wrong) recipient.

We filed a bug report, so we’ll see how long it takes them to fix this one.

Update: It was fixed in about six hours or less. Not too shabby.

Update 2: All the stray messages have disappeared from the "sent" section, and hopefully from the inbox of the recipients.