Facebook Disabled My 19-Year-Old Account. Getting Help Has Been Ridiculous.

I mainly use Facebook for Marketplace these days. I do not spend much time scrolling through it, but I still have a reason to keep the account. What I did not expect was to lose access to it and then spend days trying to find someone who could help.

I joined Facebook on July 26, 2007. That date comes directly from Facebook’s own account export. When the account was disabled on November 7, 2026, it was 19 years, 3 months, and 12 days old. That is a lot of history to lose access to, especially when the activity that appears to have led up to it was not mine.

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What happened

On November 7, Facebook sent me an email saying a passkey had been created for my account. I had not created one. The email offered a way to report that it was not me, which sounds useful until the link no longer works.

A suspension email followed. It said my account, or activity on it, did not follow the terms on who can use Facebook. It also said I had 30 days to appeal.

Then another email said Facebook thought somebody may have accessed my account without permission and had locked it to help me. That seems like a fairly good reason to let the owner secure the account and explain what happened.

Instead, I ended up at a screen saying the account had been reviewed and disabled, and I could not request another review. The email was telling me I could appeal while the account screen was telling me I could not. There was a button to download my information and a link to the terms, but no useful explanation of what had happened.

Trying to get help

I started with the hacked-account recovery page. It took me back to the disabled screen. I tried the security emails. The link to report the passkey was invalid or expired when I used it, and the unlock route did not get me past the disabled account either.

This is where the whole thing becomes ridiculous. I am trying to tell Facebook that somebody else has been using the account, and the recovery process keeps sending me back to a decision about what happened on that account. I cannot get far enough into the process to have somebody look at the difference.

I also tried Meta’s support chat. I explained the takeover and asked for a real person to review it. The AI chat said it could not create or escalate a case. I did not get a case number or reach a person who could do anything about the disabled account.

What is the point of a support chat if explaining the problem does not even result in a support case? I can have a conversation about being locked out, but I still cannot get help getting back in.

I could still log into Instagram, so I tried approaching it from there too. I prepared a report with screenshots of the Facebook emails attached. I still did not have a confirmed route to somebody who could review the Facebook account.

I eventually filed a complaint with the Ohio Attorney General. I should not have to get to that point to ask a company to investigate a compromised account. I am willing to verify who I am. I just need a process that lets me do it and gets the evidence in front of someone who can act on it.

What was in the download

Even downloading my information initially failed with an error in Facebook’s password verification dialog. I did eventually get the archive, and I went through it with AI assistance to see whether there was anything that could explain the lockout.

There was quite a bit.

The security records show an older masked browser cookie, first recorded at an Ohio login in April 2025, appearing again in the suspicious November activity. On November 7, Facebook located the associated IP addresses in New York, Georgia, and Edmonton. The New York and Georgia updates were only 22 seconds apart. A hardware record around the same time also reported a different browser environment from my recent Apple Silicon devices.

That supports my suspicion that an older browser identity or its cookies were reused. It does not prove exactly which authentication token was involved or how someone got access. The location estimates do not tell me where the person actually was either.

Two friendships were added that afternoon. I did not add them. There was the passkey alert, and then there were three ID-verification submissions that I did not make, all from the same IP Facebook located in Edmonton.

The attached document is a purported Vietnamese driver’s licence with someone else’s name, a different birth date, and a child’s naked photo. It is not my document. All three corresponding age-verification attempts show Error.

The attempts were recorded at 1:59:48, 2:00:20, and 2:00:50 p.m. Eastern. Facebook recorded a review email at 2:00:58 and disabled the account at 2:01:01.

I cannot say that the ID submissions caused the disablement. The initial suspension email came before them, and the export does not explain Meta’s internal decision. But this is exactly the sort of thing I would like a person at Facebook to look at. Was my account reviewed based on something done by whoever had gained access to it?

Facebook also recorded its own notification saying it thought my account had been hacked. That is what makes the lack of a usable recovery route so frustrating. The evidence of a possible takeover is already in their records.

Starting over should not be the answer

There are years of photos and account history behind this login. The registration date is in Facebook’s records. So are old profile photos and years of activity. I am not expecting that history to excuse a policy violation. I am expecting it to be useful when verifying who owns the account and investigating activity the owner did not authorize.

I understand that Facebook needs to prevent abuse, and I understand why account recovery needs verification. I am happy to go through that. What I cannot understand is having no workable way to get the takeover evidence reviewed after the account has been disabled.

Most of what I want to do now is use Marketplace. Having to start over after nineteen years is just dumb. It also leaves the original problem unresolved. I still would not know how the account was accessed or whether the disablement was based on somebody else’s actions.

I do not want to spend more days going through the same links or explaining the same problem to a chat that cannot open a case. I want somebody at Meta to look at what happened and give me a secure way to verify that this is my account. That should not be this difficult.

If you have actually managed to get a disabled, compromised Facebook account reviewed by a real person, I would like to hear what worked for you. In the end I may consider not using Meta or it services anymore. That includes buying Meta hardware for my children. If support is not accessible or the company is unwilling to help users its not a company I want to support.

Written November 11, 2026. I will update this post if I recover the account or receive a substantive response. Incident details come from my Facebook export and security emails. The export’s pages were generated on November 7 at 2:27 p.m. Eastern, so they do not establish what happened after that snapshot.