Why Do Posts Disappear on Facebook?

Facebook allows you to follow and respond to the exploits of friends, family and colleagues through their status updates and other posts. Sometimes, however, you may try to check a post you saw previously, only to learn that it has disappeared. If you know that no one deleted it, looking into the other potential culprits may help you locate the missing post.

Facebook provides users with the ability to remove friends from their profiles. This prevents the removed friend from gaining access to wall posts and other profile information. Checking your news feed may allow you to verify whether you can view other posts from the author of the lost post. If you cannot find any posts from that friend, he may have removed you from his Facebook friend list. You can confirm your friend status by checking to see if the person no longer appears in your list of Facebook friends.

The use of filters and blocks may limit the posts that appear in the feed. If you cannot locate a specific post, check your news feed settings. Blocking specific types of posts prevents any post that meets the criteria from appearing in your news feed. Removing the block may help you locate the missing post. In addition, changing your news feed view may cause the post to reappear in your feed.

In addition to overall profile privacy settings, Facebook offers the ability to configure the privacy settings of individual posts by clicking the privacy lock icon on the lower right corner of the post box. This allows you to hide posts from the friends you specify and offers an alternative to removing the post completely. If your friend modifies the privacy setting of a post and denies you access, the post no longer appears in your news feed and you can longer view the post on your friend's wall.

If you rule out all other explanations, a Facebook system glitch may be at the root of the problem. A glitch, or error, may occur when problems arise with the system programming. Problems with the hardware or software used by Facebook also may result in error messages and disappearing posts. Typically, once Facebook resolves the problems, the posts reappear. Sometimes logging out of Facebook and then logging in again can resolve the problem.