How to Deactivate or Delete your Facebook Account

There would be plenty of reasons as to why a user would look to either deactivate his/her account on Facebook (FB) account temporarily or look for permanent deletion of the account. In the following article, we’ll be discussing both these aspects.

Deactivating Facebook account vs Deleting Facebook account

Deactivation is a temporary process while Deleting your Facebook account completely removes all your data from the servers.

Deactivating your Facebook Account

How to deactivate my Facebook account?

Here is a step by step process on how you can deactivate your FB account:

https://youtu.be/sjOOepnUn8k

• Login to your Facebook account
• Locate the drop-down arrow on the top right of your account

• From the drop-down, click on Settings
• Click on “Your Facebook information” located in the left pane.

• Finally, Click on ‘Deactivation and deletion’.

• Select the option ‘Deactivate account’, click ‘Continue to Account Deactivation’ and follow the instructions to confirm.

That’s it. Your Facebook account is now deactivated.

What happens if you deactivate your Facebook account?

If you go ahead with deactivating your Facebook account, here is what would happen:

• Users in Facebook can no longer see your timeline or even search for you.
• Your friends may still be able to see your name in their friends list.
• Group admins may still be able to see your previous posts and comments.
• Some of the information that you posted in Facebook would still be available for users on Facebook. For example, any personal messages sent to another user in Facebook.
• The account can be reactivated whenever you want to.

Note – In case you are logged in to Facebook Messenger at the time of deactivating your Facebook account, the Messenger will continue to remain active.

How to reactivate your Facebook account?

In order to reactivate your Facebook account, all you got t do is log back in to your account or use your Facebook account to log back in some other websites. Your account would automatically be unlocked and in the same state as when you left. Do remember, in order to reactivate, you’ll need to have the access to the email id or the mobile number that you used to log back in order to complete the activation.

How to deactivate your Facebook Messenger?

In order to deactivate your Facebook Messenger once your Facebook account is deactivated, follow the steps:

• Open your Facebook Messenger
• Next, click on your profile picture in the top left corner
• Click Legal & Policies located towards the end of the scroll.

• And finally, click on the Deactivate option

To reactivate the Facebook Messenger, just log back in with your username and password.

Deleting your Facebook Account

How to delete my Facebook account permanently?

Here is a step by step process on how you can delete your FB account:

What happens if you delete your Facebook account?

If you’ve decided on completely deleting your Facebook account, here is what would happen:

• Once deleted, the account access can never be regained. However, the deletion of the account takes a few days to post the request is placed. If you log back into your account anytime in between placing the request to delete the account and deletion process, the deletion request would be automatically canceled.
• Similar to the deactivation process, some information would still be accessible to certain users on Facebook post your account deletion, like personal chats.

Can we cancel an account deletion request?

If it’s been less than 30 days since you had placed the request for account deletion, the request can be canceled. Post 30 days, all accounts and its related data would be deleted permanently and can never be retrieved again. The data will be deleted within 90 days.

How to cancel the account deletion?

Follow the following steps to cancel your account deletion:

• Login to your Facebook account within 30 days of placing the request to delete the account
• Click ‘Cancel Deletion’

The account will no longer be considered for deletion.

How to remove the account of a friend or family member who’s medically incapable?

In order to delete an account of some other member under medical situations, you can submit a request here.

How to hide my Facebook profile without deactivating?

If you want to just hide your Facebook profile from public searches, follow the below mentioned steps:

• Navigate to Settings -> Privacy
• You’ll find options on ‘Your activity’ and ‘How people can find and contact you’.

• Edit each of these setting to hide your profile from public searches.

How to Block users on Facebook?

If you want to block a certain user or a list of users in Facebook from posting on your timeline, tagging you, inviting you to events or groups, starting a conversation with you, or adding you as a friend, follow the below mentioned steps:

• Navigate to Setting -> Blocking
• You’ll find the option ‘Block Users’ along with a text field
• Enter the user’s Facebook profile id in the text box add him or her to your blocked list

Summary

In this article, we provided an overview of how deactivation and deletion of a FB account works, what areas they impact and how it can be reverted back. We also discussed other aspects of it like how to hide your Facebook account without actually deactivating or deleting it, and finally about privacy settings tor restrict user access.

Next – Learn about Facebook Audience

FAQs on Facebook Account Deactivation