A woman who will turn 105 years old in April is having to lie about her age on Facebook because the site doesn’t allow user birthdays to surpass a certain point.
Marguerite Joseph says she uses Facebook mostly to stay in touch with family which is scattered across the country, but is frustrated by the fact that she has to input her age as 99 due to a glitch in the system. Mrs. Joseph’s granddaughter, Gail Marlow, helps her update her profile on the site and responds to messages since her grandmother is legally blind. She says when she tries to update Mrs. Joseph’s birthdate to 1908, it’s automatically changed to 1928.
“All of our family members always asked how grandma was doing on my Facebook page,” said Marlow. “So I decided I would set up a page of her own so she could stay connected to her family in Canada…every time I tried to change the settings to the right year, Facebook always came back with an unknown error message and would send us right back to a year she wasn’t born in. I would love to see her real age on Facebook, I mean in April she’s going to be 105. It’s special.”
Marlow says she’s messaged Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, about the issue. Facebook released a statement soon after regarding the glitch.
“We’ve recently discovered an issue whereby some Facebook users may be unable to enter a birthday before 1910. We are working on a fix for this and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
Mrs. Joseph isn’t the only person to have a problem putting down their correct age on the social media site; last year, 105-year old Maria Colunia Seguar-Metzgar had the same issue.
Images: Facebook
Mrs. Joseph at 16