Yesterday a small portion of Facebook users found that they were temporarily locked out of their accounts. Instead of being able to access the site, they were shown an error message asking them to verify themselves by uploading a photo ID to the site:

The Facebook account lockout glitch has now been fixed, and the social network has since released as statement on the matter:

“Earlier this evening, we showed an account verification message to a very small portion of our users unnecessarily. We promptly removed the messages when we discovered the error. We’re sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused.”

While for some it may have been nothing more than a minor inconvenience, not being able to access a social network – or to put a finer point on it, your content held on the network – can actually cause serious problems.

Most businesses now have Facebook Pages and many smaller companies use them as their primary method for engaging with customers and clients on a day to day basis. If you were working to a brief that a customer sent you over Facebook, you’d have no way of accessing the project information, and wouldn’t be able to do your job.

Taking control of the content you create on social networks is possible, and the first step is to make sure that you possess at least a copy of that data yourself. SocialSafe is the social content organiser that allows you to locally backup the data from your social network accounts, as well as do more with your data via the additional features and Insights tools. To get started, download the free trial now.