facebook authentication error – you are not permitted to do that

by Nabeel on July 18, 2009

I was wandering around facebook today and while doing random stuff i saw this error on facebook saying:

Authentication Failure
You are not permitted to do that.

Well i got this loss of permission and error of authentication failure by facebook in this situation:

I was logged into facebook with my email id. I was surfing through it and checked one of the profiles (it was not already in my friends list). I liked to add that person, but not in this id, but my other one. So i opened facebook on new tab/page and logged off facebook on that other page and logged in with my other facebook id. Why i did it in new page? well if you do so then you probably know why ;) because i wanted to keep that person's profile page open! ofcourse!

Now when i went back to the person's facebook profile tab and clicked Add as friend, It gave me authentication error, saying that you are not permitted to do this. And well it was pretty simply to solve it too!

Well, so obviously! the solution was simple enough! simply refresh that persons profile page, it will reload the same page again. Now when you try to add that person to your facebook profile, it will not give you the error. It probably gave the error because your cookies were not the same as the current account. That's why facebook gave the authentication failure error and told you that you are not permissted to do that action.

If you got this error on facebook while doing some thing different and solved it in different way, please let me know in the comments below.