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UPDATE 10/10/2009 – After 6 e-mails to Facebook support my friend who alerted me about this problem has now had their profile fixed, so keep e-mailing them, use the contact form link further down this article.

There is currently a MAJOR problem with Facebook, thousands of people cannot see their own profile page and neither can their friends.

Instead when anyone attempts to look at their profile page Facebook is displaying an error message saying:

“the page you requested was not found.
you may have clicked an expired link or mistyped the address. Some web addresses are case sensitive.”

Users with this problem can log-in as normal and still see the news feed, update their status and look at friends profiles, but they (and their friends) can’t look at their own profile.

It’s not clear exactly how many people are being affected by the “Page You Requested Not Found” Facebook bug, but I am certain it is at least tens of thousands, if not many, many more.

This is not a browser problem, the profiles do not display regardless of whether you use Firefox, Internet Explorer or Chrome, the problem is with Facebook (although interestingly if you have this error on your Facebook account you are still able to view your profile on a mobile phone).

There are some simple ways of fixing this nasty Facebook bug, which works on about 60% of the Facebook profiles that say “page cannot be displayed”.

Fix 1) To fix a non-displaying Facebook profile log-in to the account and go to Settings > User Name and change the User Name to something else (bear in mind you are only allowed to change your Facebook user name once, so choose carefully).

Once you have changed the username, log out and back in again and the profile page should be displaying correctly again.

However, it doesn’t work for everyone and anyone who has previously changed their username cannot use this fix.

Fix 2) If this doesn’t work, there is another way of fixing the problem, try changing the language in the bottom left of the page to English (Upside Down) save the change, log out and back in, then change it back again, hopefully now you will be able to see your profile page.

Again, this doesn’t work for everyone and I know of some people who have now been unable to access their profile page for over a month.

Fix 3) The next step if you still have an error message on your profile page is to e-mail Facebook support, you need to do it from the contact form found here, under “URL of Profile that causes this error” you must put in the address from your profile page where the “The Page You Requested Was Not Found” error is showing.

After contacting Facebook some people have their profile working again within a few hours, but other people have made contact and days later are still unable to view their profile page (this is possibly due to the growing number of people contacting Facebook with the same problem).

Fix 4) If all else fails….keep e-mailing Facebooks helpdesk every day, if you are really desperate you could set up a totally new Facebook account until your old profile is repaired by the Facebook team.