Lollipop Local

“Why has my Facebook profile avatar suddenly turned into what looks like a blurred red potato head?”

To the rest of us, his profile picture was the usual one of him standing in front of a selection of his artwork but all Simon Kirk could see was the blurred outline of Mr Potato Head.

Naturally, this opened the door to a whole plethora of comedic answers about his usual appearance.

But, all jokes aside, it was most peculiar.

I asked around and some social media manager friends reminded me of the Facebook Ad virus which was doing the rounds back in April propogating blurred ad images in profile pics and the banner cover images.

The cause is the download of a browser extension that contains the virus.

How to get rid of any unusual blurred profile picture images on Facebook

So, if you have downloaded something new recently, it’s worth giving it a check. Here is a more detailed set of instructions for use with the browsers Chrome and Safari.

Whenever such a problem occurs, you should always run a system scan and clear out your cache, followed by the time-honoured, traditional fix it of switching the machine on and off again.

The latter seems to have worked for Simon.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2012 at 9:49 am and is filed under Facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.