In the last few days many Facebook users of the country  found their accounts disabled as the authorities of the social networking site began to detect and disable fake accounts.

Those who failed to access their accounts were asked to go through a verification process to regain their accounts, said affected users.

Facebook asked them to provide necessary information by clicking "submit an appeal" on its website. Some users provided images of their identity cards, email IDs and their account names on Facebook.

Facebook on Friday said it disrupted an international fake account operation that was firing off "inauthentic likes" and "bogus comments" to win friends it would then pound with spam, AFP reports.

Dev Devashis, a user who found his account disabled Friday evening, said he sent his information to Facebook but didn't get any response till Saturday evening.

At least three newsmen at The Daily Star's newsroom found their account disabled on Friday.

The move also resulted in a "sudden fall of likes" on the pages of some organisations.

Zahid Newaz Khan, editor of channelionline.com, said they lost several thousand "likes" overnight.

Another company manager, wishing not to be named, said they lost nearly 30,000 likes on their page.

“We don't want people with fake IDs to be engaged with us, but we don't want to lose real people either,” he said.

Facebook's security team spent six months fighting to neutralise what they saw as a coordinated campaign, according to Shabnam Shaik, a company security manager, the AFP report adds.

"Our systems were able to identify a large portion of this illegitimate activity -- and to remove a substantial number of inauthentic likes," Shaik said in a blog post.

"By disrupting the campaign now, we expect that we will prevent this network of spammers from reaching its end goal of sending inauthentic material to large numbers of people."

The ring used accounts in a number of countries including Bangladesh, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.

The group tried to mask its activities with tactics like connecting with the social network through "proxy" servers to disguise where "likes," posts or other communications were originating, according to Shaik.

Facebook said the campaign aimed to trick people into connecting as friends they would later target with spam. The company said it had derailed the operation early enough to spare users that fate.

The leading social network said it has started weeding out bogus accounts by watching for suspicious behavior such as repetitive posts or torrents of messages.

The security improvement was described as being part of a broader effort to rid the leading social network of hoaxes, misinformation and fake news by verifying people's identities.