Facebook had a little too much prosecco last night it seems, because this morning it has been congratulating people on being friends on the social network for 46 years.

Facebook was founded in February 2004, so these false "On This Day" notifications understandably confused a great many people, who began to link the mix-up to New Year's festivities.

The reason for the bug is being reported as to do with the Unix Epoch system, which counts dates upwards from 1 January, 1970.

Speculation is that the “friends with since” feature was launched after certain friendships had been formed, meaning they were stored in Facebook’s data as having a start date of “0” (or 1 January, 1970).

As such, Facebook has read these friendships of having lasted for 46 years.

Facebook spokesperson Chelsea Kohle said in a statement: