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Developers write apps for Facebook not because it's a wonder of modern software, but because it lets them tap into Facebook's 60 million users. The result: a surfeit of zombie bites and Scrabble challenges, spread, in Valley parlance, "virally" from friend to friend on the social network. Last night, Facebook proved antiviral. A bug deleted all pending requests from friends to add an application. "Anyone else seeing that invitation acceptance numbers are down significantly over the past 7-8 hours?" one developer wrote in a Facebook forum. "Since about midnight PT, our signup numbers through requests/invites are about 40% lower than we'd normally expect." Facebook's response? An emoticon!

Hey, there appears to have been some data loss last night. It seems (ironically) that a script that was supposed to be backing things up and cleaning out old platform requests that were already acted on actually went haywire and instead deleted new requests that were not supposed to have been deleted. :(

Somehow, the all-powerful colon plus closed parenthesis managed to placate developers. Next up: Community relations via lolcats.