Humanities

“I lost all my messages. What if I was speaking to the love of my life???” a Tinder user lamented when a technical issue prevented users from logging into the dating app for a few hours on Wednesday.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has had a number of serious repercussions for Facebook, its users, and the future of privacy around the world.

Shortly after Facebook announced stricter rules for its third-party developers, popular dating app Tinder stopped working. Singles who tried to get some swiping in on their lunch breaks weren’t allowed to log in to the app. A pop-up window said, “Tinder requires you to provide additional Facebook permissions in order to create or use a Tinder account.” Like many apps, Tinder primarily lets people log in with their Facebook credentials.

“This was part of the changes that we announced today, and we are working with Tinder to address this issue,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNN Tech.

Upset Tinder users took to Twitter to vent.

@Tinder it would be great if you didnt need to ask for broken facebook login permissions while i pay for gold status??

— Jamie Ross (@coolmate108) April 4, 2018

I LOST ALL MY MESSAGES. WHAT IF I WAS SPEAKING TO THE LOVE OF MY LIFE??? COME ON

— Bianca (@biianncaa1) April 4, 2018

either god or my fbi agent logged me out of tinder and i can’t log back on but it’s probably for the best

— leila “struggs to func” waits (@leilalw) April 4, 2018

Facebook is still recovering from revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with connections to the Trump campaign, accessed the data of millions of its users. Facebook has been rushing to repair its relationship with users and prevent any future misuses of data by third-parties.

On Wednesday, it announced changes to what personal information apps can collect.

“We will also no longer allow apps to ask for access to personal information such as religious or political views, relationship status and details, custom friends lists, education and work history, fitness activity, book reading activity, music listening activity, news reading, video watch activity, and games activity,” Facebook said in its post.

It is unclear exactly which part of Facebook’s updates caused the issues with Tinder. The app shows you information about potential paramours like age, location and where they went to school. Other dating apps that use Facebook to login, like Bumble, did not experience outages.

Tinder said in a statement Wednesday night that the problem was fixed.

“We found a resolution and quickly resumed service,” a Tinder spokesperson said. “We ask our users to ensure that they have updated the app and are running the most recent version.”

After Tinder was repaired, many users said their matches were all missing. After a few hours, those matches appeared to have been restored as well.

As of Wednesday afternoon, people were able to use the app and – if only for a moment – feel a little less alone in the world.

Source: Heather Kelly/CNN

Related: Facebook won’t make that mistake again, says Zuckerberg