Was the US Navy not paying attention, or were there more severe problems around Facebook (that itself had a stunning error this week)?

The USS Kidd (DDG-100) is one of the US Navy’s most famous destroyers. It has been in service since 2007. It also has a Facebook page, which can be found here. The problem was (quite unusual for a battleship) suddenly, Age of Empires live broadcasts started on the social platform. Navy spokeswoman Commander Nicole Schwegman told military news outlet Task and Purpose that the USS Kidd’s (DDG-100) page had been hacked and they were working with Facebook to resolve the issue.

The weirdness started on October 3, when the usual posts (related to the ship and crew members) were suddenly followed by a “Hahahahaha.” A few hours later, on October 4, a “play game.” followed, so someone wanted to play a game, and from there came the unusual comments (“hi everyone”; “hi guys”; and our favourite, “ffffffffffffffffff”, which doesn’t need much translation).

The timing must be interesting, since this week, Facebook has gone down for several hours with all its acquired services; Twitch’s database has been leaked (and the Amazon site for streaming is not exactly in a secure state), and now, the USS Kidd (DDG-100) has produced some oddities. However, these broadcasts and posts have disappeared, some images have preserved these unusual events. But what might be behind them?

Task and Purpose (cleverly, we might add) pointed out in its original post that “hacked” is often used as an IT illiterate term and that this is why the phrase is repeatedly used when all that happened was that someone forgot to log out of the site’s account at the end of working hours. The Navy also then pointed out that nothing severe happened: their social media manager didn’t switch from their warship account to their profile before playing Age of Empires.

So the story had a happy ending, and the USS Kidd (DDG 100) got some unusual but positive news coverage. So, it was a win-win situation.

Source: PCGamer