2020-12-26

Facebook portal oddness

Obviously, as it was Christmas day, I ended up spending an hour helping a friend with tech support. Their Facebook portal was being a tad odd. So I post here in case anyone has any suggestions - as I was stumped!

She had factory reset and re-setup it anyway to try and get it working, and we tried resetting several times, and clearing the logins on the Facebook app (which also resets the portal). Here are the symptoms:

  • During set up, we connected to Facebook and it showed on the Facebook app as logged in, all sensibly. We selected some "favourites" as normal during set up (i.e. it showed contacts with check boxes as you would expect).
  • The home screen shows suggested contacts of the person themself! Not any actual contacts!
  • Trying to add a favourite shows an empty screen - no contacts to add!
  • Searching a contact shows not found.
  • However, incoming calls work, but they do not then show in "recent" after the call - it says no calls!
  • Saying "Hey portal, call Adrian" (or any other contact) correctly shows the contact or contacts matching, with name and picture, but selecting one does not actually make the call - just nothing happens.
  • Installing the portal app on the phone shows the favourites that we selected on set up of the portal.

Over all, it is just plain weird. We cannot see any sort of privacy settings blocking contacts (and if there were, the fact the "Hey portal" shows them would a be a bug).

Suggestions welcome!

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