How to Contact Facebook Through Email and Phone

There are a lot of different ways to contact a company. You can call their offices or their employees directly, you can email anyone who works there or any of the official email addresses, you can send a letter to their home base or any of their branch offices, you can get a messenger to delivery a message in person, you can text certain numbers, and more.

Of course, some of these methods don’t work for certain businesses. Often, large companies will lock down certain modes of communication, either by keeping them hidden or by disabling them entirely.

Companies like Facebook, for example, simply have so much to do at any given time that it’d be impossible for them to answer every query. Heck, it’s simple mathematics. Facebook has an audience of over 1.6 billion monthly active users. Even if .1% of those users send in one ticket per month, that’s still 1,600,000 tickets per month. Facebook only has 13,598 employees. If every single one of them were dedicated to customer service, that would still be 4 tickets per employee per day, every day of every month, including weekends.

Realistically, not even a quarter of Facebook’s staff is customer support, and of those who are, many are dedicated to specific geographic regions or languages. The rest are managers, IT support for the data centers, programmers and developers, executives, advertisers and advertising account managers, and so forth. Support is just one minor aspect of the whole massive business.

This is why Facebook’s troubleshooting process is a little slipshod. If you have a problem, you Google it. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a good, robust answer, often on this blog. If you’re not, you might end up in the horrible pit of broken English and non-answers that is Facebook’s support forums. No one officially working with Facebook actually posts relevant answers there; they all just paste in simple links to other support threads or occasionally documentation. Meanwhile you have people resurrecting three year old threads with problems that don’t have anything to do with the threads, people posting their unrelated problems as replies to non-solutions from other users, and a whole lot of other awkwardness.

What I’m saying is that Facebook’s support community is practically non-existent. If you find yourself relying on their forums for support, you might as well abandon all hope of getting your issue solved. When an actual employee does deign to step in and answer something, it’s usually a platitude like this.

For direct queries, when you’re avoiding the forums and you can’t find information on other websites, Facebook greatly prefers you go through one of their many, many forms. They have forms for everything from reporting a page to memorializing a profile to a million other issues.

Facebook Phone Support

There are two main phone numbers that float around when asking about Facebook phone support. If you want to give them a call, feel free, but I’ll tell you right up front; they probably won’t help you.

The first number is 888-275-2174. This is NOT Facebook support! There are varied reports about what they actually are, but the most common is that they’re a scam company that will pretend to be Facebook support, only to get you to install malware on your computer and demand payments for their services. You can see some more evidence if you Google the number. You’ll see it show up as some guy’s “tech support” number, a number for Skype customer service, a number for Flickr, and more.

If the number was actually Facebook’s, you would know it, because all of the results would be official Facebook pages. If it was legit, it wouldn’t show up as a number for other services entirely. It’d be one thing if it showed up as a support number for another Facebook-owned property, but Skype? Skype is owned by Microsoft, an unaffiliated company. There’s no way they would share customer service numbers.

Again, do NOT call the 888 number above. I’m only even publishing the full number so you know which one I’m talking about, and because it’s posted all over the place.

The other customer service number is the one provided by Gethuman.com, a site I love. It’s a site dedicated to mapping and navigating phone trees, to tell people the fastest way to get through an automated phone system and get to an actual human operator. The number they provide is 650-543-4800.

Now, this number seems to be a little more legitimate, and it actually is owned by Facebook. The trouble is, it’s strictly an automated system. There’s no line at the other end for a human to pick up. You can see a map of the phone tree here. Some of the options tell you to email them, some of them tell you to visit the appropriate support page, and some of them give you instructions for fixing specific problems. None of them get you phone support.

There’s also the spoofing issue. In some cases, people have reported this number as calling them. Rest assured that Facebook will never call you; the people calling with this number are spoofing caller ID. They are, of course, a scam. If someone calls you claiming to be Facebook, hang up; they’re just trying to steal your personal information and/or money.

Once again, Facebook offers no public phone support. The best you’re going to get is that phone tree guiding you to online pages that offer self help advice. If any number calls you claiming to be Facebook, or if anyone posts a number claiming that it’s Facebook’s offices or support, it’s a fake number. I’m not even going to say “probably” fake; it’s fake.

One actually legitimate number is for Facebook’s accommodations department. This is a federally mandated number for disabled people to contact Facebook to make accommodations for their disability, in this case for if they’re applying to a job. The number is 650-308-7837, but again, this is NOT a support number. You won’t get any support help here.

Email Support

Some of the phone tree options give you some email addresses you can try for specific kinds of support. Some of them are potentially more valid than others.

• records@facebook.com is the email address for law enforcement. If you have a law enforcement query or if there’s an eminent matter at hand, you can email this line. However, if you are not a law enforcement agent, I highly recommend you do not use this line. At best you will be ignored; at worst you could get in the way of an investigation and be charged with obstruction of justice. Okay, so that’s a little unlikely, but still; don’t use it, it won’t help you.
• partners@fb.com is one of two email addresses available to contact the business development department. This is primarily for high-tier businesses that may be interested in a partnership of some kind, like Instagram or Oculus before Facebook bought them. Small businesses or individuals with support issues will find no help here.
• advertise@fb.com is the other email address for the business department, and is more geared towards matters of advertising. You may be able to get some help here, but only if your issue is specifically related to Facebook ads themselves. Even so, often the person in charge of the account is going to refer you to form-pasted messages or the self help tools.
• marketing@fb.com is the email address for the marketing department. Note that this is not related to your marketing, but rather to Facebook’s itself. If you have a problem with Facebook’s marketing campaigns in your area, this would be the place to reach. Otherwise, no luck.
• press@fb.com is the email address to reach the Facebook press department. If you’re a reporter looking to contact someone in Facebook for a comment on a news story, or for an interview of some kind, this would be where you reach out. You won’t find support help here, though.
• hr@fb.com is the email address for the human resources department at Facebook. It’s specifically used as a portal for employees or new hires to ask questions and receive information about their employment. If you’re not employed by Facebook, you won’t get any help here.
• Accommodations-ext@fb.com is a line specifically for setting up accommodations for disabled people hoping to visit a Facebook office or apply for a job at Facebook.

This is quite the list of Facebook email addresses, but again, none of them work for general customer support. I’m only assuming support is the reason you’re here; maybe I’m wrong. Maybe one of these email addresses fit the bill for what you were looking for. If so, I’m happy to help. On the other hand, if you’re looking for an actual customer support email, you’re out of luck.

Much like phone support, Facebook does not have an email support portal. If you want to get in touch with them, you will need to use one of their many, many support forms. Yes, I know these forms take a long time to process and that you often won’t get a helpful response at all. It doesn’t matter; there’s no way to expedite the situation.

Other Means of Support

Facebook’s community forums, as I mentioned before, are a pit of black despair. There’s very rarely any help to be found there, since it’s not a support forum, it’s a community forum. It’s meant for knowledgeable users to help those less fortunate in the ways of the mind. Unfortunately, anyone who has a solution to a problem avoids those forums, so the only people answering questions tend to be people who have no idea how to help.

If you’re going to search the internet at large for a solution to your problem, I recommend setting the search time to the most recent year or most recent six months. Sometimes an old problem and a new problem show the same symptoms, but the means of fixing the old problem rely on the old Facebook design, and the options have since been removed. Those old posts are awful to find, because they’re completely unhelpful but will clog up search results if you don’t filter them.

Honestly, though, the most reliable way to contact Facebook is to use one of the hundreds of support forms and hope that Facebook will see your ticket in a timely fashion, respond to it, and help you out.

Before filling out a form, here are a few tips.

• Make sure the contact information you have in Facebook is valid. If you’re filing a ticket, you will get a response in the inbox of the email address you’re using. If you don’t have access to that email inbox, you’re not going to see a response even if there is one. Unfortunately, this makes troubleshooting email issues a lot harder.
• Don’t submit more than one ticket for the same issue. There’s nothing a support agent hates more than being flooded with redundant tickets, partially because it clutters up their legitimate work, and partially because it hurts their success metrics. They’ll be less inclined to help you at all.
• Make sure to pick the right form for the problem you’re having. It’s easy to get wires crossed, but each form leads to a specific kind of support, so if your issue doesn’t fit the form, you’re not going to get the right kind of support.

As for the forms to fill out, you have two options. The first is to go to the Facebook help center and run a search for your issue, hoping it will parse your question appropriately and will take you where you need to go. The second is to use one of these two posts of forms to find the one you need, and use it directly.

1. Post Planner’s List of Facebook Support Forms
2. Mari Smith’s Facebook Contact Directory

If you can’t find support in one of those, well, your issue is probably not with Facebook at all. I recommend the usual troubleshooting steps of a virus