Dhaka: Social networking giant Facebook has apologised to all the users, including the ones in Dhaka, who accidentally received computer-automated messages asking if they were safe from Sunday’s Lahore bombings.

Users far across the globe, including the ones in Dhaka, showed notifications of an SMS which specifically asked, ‘Have you been affected by the explosion?’, but did not say where it happened.

The flawed notices were the latest stumble in Facebook’s evolving ‘Safety Check’ practice of prompting users to quickly let their friends know they are okay after being in the vicinity of a tragedy.

The geo-targeted safety check-in feature has been deployed only a handful of times since its introduction in 2014. Facebook assesses users’ risk by analysing the city listed in their profile, the last IP address they used to log in to the site and, if they use the ‘nearby friends’ feature, their last known location, the company said during the rollout.

The glitch may be understandable, according to Sohel, a local tech engineer, saying that the notification was directed from the location of the blasts, namely Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park in Lahore.

Hence, Facebook’s backend, as Sohel says, dispatched the automated safety check messages to users nearby, but the glitch forced it to redirect to its users in the capital’s Gulshan area, thousands of miles away from the bombing location.

‘I was literally shocked and somewhat scared when I received the SMS from Facebook,’ said Faria, a user who was in Gulshan on Monday evening when she got the message.

After much deliberation, she read the rejoinder from Facebook, that too in their Disaster Response page.

The rejoinder reads: ‘This kind of bug is counter to our intent. We worked quickly to resolve the issue and we apologize to anyone who mistakenly received the notification.’

The Lahore bombing took place in a park that was crowded with families, with many women and children among the victims on Sunday, killing at least 60 people and injuring 300 more.