Symantec issued an update to its Norton anti-virus software that mistakenly flagged Facebook as a phishing website.
The problems, found in updated versions of Norton Internet Security and Norton Anti-Virus, was brought to Symantec's attention Wednesday (Oct. 12) on a company message board that saw customers sounding off about their inability to access the social network because Symantec had flagged it as a fraudulent Web page.
Lighting up the message board were posts titled, "Why is Norton blocking my Facebook access as a 'phishing site,'" and "Norton is blocking my Facebook … VERY annoying. Any help?"
The issue affected customers using Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, Apple Safari and Google Chrome. Though the update cut off Norton customers from Facebook, the outage was only temporary; Symantec resolved the issue "within hours," The Register reported.
"From the looks of support forum postings, affected users were left dazed and confused rather than seriously inconvenienced or aggrieved by the screw-up," The Register wrote.
Symantec urged Norton Internet Security customers affected by the slip-up to run LiveUpdate, which will automatically fix the situation and remove the "fraudulent" tag from Facebook.
Anti-virus software updates that erroneously mark certain websites as malware are not uncommon; just a few weeks ago, Microsoft's security tools accidentally erased Google Chrome from 3,000 Windows machines after flagging it as dangerous.