Facebook shut down hoax spreads like fire

Internet faux news site Weekly World News posted an outrageous story that Facebook will be shut down on March 15th 2011, due to the stress it has put Founder Mark Zuckerberg through.

Normally this type of news would not even be worth our time and effort, but an unfortunate situation occurred where thousands of viewers actually believed the story and shared it on Facebook. Over the past hour, 40 of my 320+ friends shared this story, and I’ve received a couple messages and emails about it from “worried” fans. I expect that the situation will get worse, sparking more controversy over the Internet.

Here is a snippet from the article:

PALO ALTO, CA –Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will be shut down in March. Managing the site has become too stressful.

“Facebook has gotten out of control,” said Zuckerberg in a press conference outside his Palo Alto office, “and the stress of managing this company has ruined my life. I need to put an end to all the madness.”

Zuckerberg went on to explain that starting March 15th, users will no longer be able to access their Facebook accounts.

“After March 15th the whole website shuts down,” said Avrat Humarthi, Vice President of Technical Affairs at Facebook. “So if you ever want to see your pictures again, I recommend you take them off the internet. You won’t be able to get them back once Facebook goes out of business.”

So just to confirm, this is a fake story by a faux news site, similar to that of The Onion and Chive. As a reminder, always fact check before passing on stories, or else what happened today will keep happening over and over (like this trend will ever stop anyway)… oh yea, use some common sense. Also, with a company estimated at being worth over $50 billion, why would anyone even think of suddenly shutting it down. As a friend said, it would obviously make sense to sell it off rather than just kill it all together.