Facebook is starting to block people who have not activated ‘Facebook Protect’

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Several Facebook users have received an email and notifications in their Facebook app advising them that “your account requires advanced Facebook Protect security” and that they must activate Facebook Protect by a specific date or they will be locked out of their account.

The program, according to Facebook, is a “security program for groups of people who are more likely to be targeted by malicious hackers, such as human rights defenders, journalists, and government officials.” This is intended to ensure that these accounts are monitored for hacking threats and protected by two-factor authentication (2FA).

Unfortunately, the email Facebook sent from the address [email protected] looked like a relatively common form of spam, so it’s likely that many people ignored it.

It wasn’t spam. It was real. The first deadline for many people was Thursday, March 17. And now they can’t access their Facebook accounts and are having trouble with the process Facebook is giving them to log back in.

Those who didn’t activate Facebook Protect before the deadline will receive a message explaining why they can’t log in to their accounts and offering to help them activate it. However, this doesn’t always work:

I got locked out from Facebook indefinitely today because I didn’t respond to emails from FB (that looked like a scam) about its new Facebook Protect system, which I was required to enable by today. So far, the text and security key options don’t work, many report. pic.twitter.com/0aXbiqzLv7

— Liv. (@Olivia_Thiessen) March 18, 2022

Twitter and other social networking sites have also seen several complaints about people being locked out of their accounts, even when they have taken the appropriate security measures. Some say their text-based 2FA doesn’t work:

Others complained that they couldn’t complete the activation process before the deadline, so their accounts were effectively locked out.