37 Interesting Facts You Didn’t Know About Facebook

COVERING THEIR BASES

Facebook goes the extra mile to protect its brand, owning around 1,900 Facebook-related domain names including FB.com, IHateTheFacebookLikeButton.com and FacebookCreditsSuck.org

HIGH FIVING HACKERS

While most tech companies hate hackers, Facebook welcomes them, encouraging users to look for bugs on the site, with rewards of around $500 cash. In 2014, the company reportedly paid out $1.3 million (£900,000) to 321 bug catchers. They’ve even named one of the buildings at FB HQ after hacking (pictured). In early 2017, Facebook awarded a Russian security researcher, Andrew Leonov, $40,000 (£28k) for discovering Facebook was vulnerable to a “remote code execution” flaw – its biggest-ever bounty.

YOU’RE HIRED

Proving how much they respect hackers, in 2005 university student Chris Putnam attacked Facebook with a virus that made its pages look like competitor MySpace. Instead of taking legal action, Facebook co-founder and then COO Dustin Moskovitz began messaging Putnam and eventually persuaded him to drop out of school and work at Facebook as an engineer.

UNBELIEVABLE PERKS

If you’re lucky enough to actually work for Facebook, you’ll get a pretty sweet deal. Often voted one of the best places to work, offices feature free vending machines dolling out computer accessories, a video arcade, on-site barbershop, treadmill desks and tons of restaurants and cafes offering free meals.

GET TO WORK

But staff work hard too. The phrase “this journey is 1% finished” is posted on the office walls around the world, reminding staffers “that we’ve only begun to fulfill our mission to make the world more open and connected”.

ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK

The most common type of person to get “unfriended” on the site are high school friends who are blamed for posting inappropriate or polarizing posts. We’re looking at you Sandra and your 100 cats.