I was locked out of Facebook early Saturday morning up until Sunday morning. That was the scariest 27 hours!

I don’t know why, but when I went to look at it first thing in the morning, it had me locked out and asked me for a personal ID to get back into the account!

I sent them my drivers license.

It seems this has been going on for many years, but I had never heard of this before. If there is some suspicious activity related to your account, they want to protect you so they lock the account and ask for ID, which in the end works out because people cannot use your photos and clone you then.

Anyway, it’s a scary thing because you don’t realize all of your life that is associated with Facebook. I use the messenger service just as much as texting. I use Facebook for business daily. I run ads on it for my marketing company and I use it to converse with customers sometimes. I also use it to converse with friends and relatives and keep up with them like we all do. Also, when I was writing the news I would use it to verify the spelling of people’s names and sometimes I would get their photo from their to use in a news story, with their permission. It’s become such a part of our lives, it’s amazing the power it has over us.

I use Facebook for everything, not just communicating, but for news. I follow so many news sites – the usual, The NY Times, The Wash Post, etc. but also Channel 3 in Phoenix or The Boston Globe and the Cincinnati Enquirer. Why? Who knows. I follow all sorts of news sites. I follow a lot of cartoonists, too. Basically my whole life is on there.

And of course I publish Tomversation comics Monday through Friday on Facebook as well as other places like Instagram and at TomFalco.com. It was quite upsetting because I just started publishing my comics there and have worked up to quite a large number of followers/fans, but I noticed that if I make a temporary personal Facebook page, I can somehow get in there and continue to post and sort of make it work.

What riled me is that I have ads running on my business page. The account was down, I couldn’t get in but was being charged for ads and I couldn’t get into the account to stop them. This is a multi-billion dollar company, maybe trillion dollar company, with all of our info and there is no way to call them or email them. And you can’t use the forms to reach them unless you are signed into your account, which you cannot do if you are locked out.

One more thing – don’t ever sign up for other accounts through Facebook, I use my email account. You know when you go to join something else and it asks, “Would you like to sign up using your Facebook account or email?” Choose the email. Otherwise, you would be locked out of all those accounts, as well.