Palo Alto, California:

Facebook, Inc. abruptly abandoned a plan to implement a new captcha verification system which was intended to allay concerns of “fake accounts” by Russian bots after an apparent glitch in the system resulted in company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg being unable to access his account for over eleven hours last Saturday.

Facebook has struggled to find an appropriate means of preventing Russian bots from using the social median giant as a platform for influencing U.S. elections after late 2016, when CNN determined that Hillary Clinton lost the election due to about fourteen Russians buying ads that depicted Jesus arm-wrestling with the devil and making a page called “Woke Blacks.” Unfortunately, as Mr. Zuckerberg was beta-testing the new captcha verification system, he was inadvertently locked out of his account.

Facebook director Marc Andreessen immediately began working with Mr. Zuckerberg in successive vain attempts to restore Mr. Zuckerberg access. Sources close to Mr. Zuckberg state that finally he regained account access only after texting a cellphone picture of the 117th captcha image to Mr. Andreessen, whereafter he replied with a text message of the decoded captcha.

Despite the setback, Mr. Zuckerberg appears not to be dissuaded in his quest to deter Russian hackers. “Trust me,” he said, “Nothing is more important to me and my fellow humans at Facebook from preventing what happened in the 2016 election from ever happening again.”