The real meaning of Facebook’s ‘content not available’ message
How many times has this happened to you: you’re just scrolling through Facebook, looking at your friends’ posts and suddenly see a message saying that this content is not available right now? Or you follow a link someone posted and get the same message? It’s frustrating, annoying and there’s no way around the message but after reading this article, you will at least know what some reasons for the message might be.
You’ve encountered a Facebook CDN error
Tech and the internet are complicated – there are a lot of components and things that go wrong every second. When you see an error message on Facebook, it could be just that – a random error that happened somewhere in the network and caused the platform to return an error page to you instead of the content you were trying to access. In most cases, coming back to the same link a few minutes or hours later will resolve the technical issues.
You’re not old enough to browse the content
This is probably the most common reason why people encounter the “Sorry, this content isn’t available at the moment” message on Facebook. Facebook pages can place age restrictions on specific content they post or on their entire profiles. Sometimes this is done by choice, while sometimes the owner of the page is required to do this to comply with local and national laws. For instance, pages that advertise alcohol, gambling or erotic content may restrict their pages to people over 18 or 21 years of age.
Facebook content is not available to people in your country
Just like with age restrictions, the owners of Facebook pages can restrict their content, allowing only people who live in specific countries to view it. If the owner of the page has restricted people in your country from seeing it, there will be no way for you to view the content.
Facebook privacy settings could cause an error message
If you are getting an error message when you’re trying to access content that was posted by a personal profile and not a Facebook page, then it’s very likely due to the privacy settings set by the owner of the profile. For instance, if a Facebook post is only open to friends and you’re not Facebook friends with the owner of the profile, then you won’t be able to view the content. The post might also be available only to the person who posted it or to specific friend groups.
Facebook error message for deleted posts
Sometimes, Facebook content is deleted. This can happen when the user deletes the content they’ve posted or when Facebook removes content from the platform because it violates its rules, policies, etc. In most cases, when you try to access deleted content on Facebook, you will see a message telling you that the content has been removed. But sometimes, you might encounter a generic error message instead.
The Facebook account has been suspended
When you’re trying to access Facebook content by following a link to it instead of simply visiting a profile and browsing the content in its feed, you might encounter a generic error message. One of the reasons for this is that the profile has been temporarily banned or suspended and all the content on that page has been removed from public access. This means that once the owner of the account resolves the issue and the profile is reinstated, you will be able to access all its old content once again.
Facebook has filtered the content you’re trying to access
Facebook has the ability to filter the content it doesn’t like or content that government agencies request to be filtered. This can result in random ‘content unavailable’ messages to show up when you try to access such posts on the platform.
