I have been thinking about this vague memory lately. Somewhere between 2011 and 2013, I used to go on an application on Facebook called "Video Chat Rounds" (article:
https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/video-chat-roun...). It was an app on which you could video chat with other Facebook users (basically the same thing as Omegle). It used to be an app on the Facebook platform.
Back in the day I was still a kid and thought it was pretty cool to see and talk to people all over the world. There is one thing that is bothering me. I have this memory that sometimes, after I had just been on the app and went back to my Facebook homepage, I was suddenly logged into a random Facebook account from a person I had never heard of before. As a kid, that felt really illegal and scared me.
Now, many years later, I am wondering whether this memory is something which really happened or which I made up. It seems very unlikely you could get logged in as another user (without entering any credentials) on a platform like Facebook. However, I do believe it is a real memory.
My question is the following one: could this memory be real and if so, what did Facebook do wrong?
Servers have to keep track of which clients are logged into which users, usually via a session token. Memory corruption or a race condition can cause one token to be associated with another user.