Facebook Inc.’s “Year in Review” feature lets users relieve their memories from 2014, but for some people the images and posts displayed focused on some of the worst moments of their lives.

One such user was Eric Meyer, a web designer from Ohio who lost his six-year-old daughter, Rebecca, to brain cancer earlier this year.

Meyer logged on to Facebook to see his Year in Review displayed at the top of his page, with a picture of his deceased daughter looking back at him.

Meyer explained in a blog post that he had intentionally been avoiding the Year in Review because he knew what it would show.

“They were easy enough to pass over, and I did,” Meyer wrote. “Until today, when I got this in my feed, exhorting me to create one of my own. ‘Eric, here’s what your year looked like!'”

“Algorithmic cruelty”

Meyer admitted that the Facebook’s new feature was not a “deliberate assault.”

“This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases,” Meyer wrote. “But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.”

Meyer criticized the web industry, saying that if he could change on thing, it would be “to increase awareness of and consideration for the failure modes, the edge cases, the worst-case scenarios.”

Sympathizing with Meyer, one commenter on his blog post stated that he received a push notification from Facebook, encouraging him to friend his ex-wife’s lover. Other commenters noted similar gaffs on the part of Facebook’s algorithms.

After Meyer’s blog post gained public attention, Jonathan Gheller, the Facebook product manager overseeing development of the Year in Review feature, emailed Meyer an apology and made a statement to the Washington Post about the issue.

“[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy,” Gheller said. The team behind the feature is reviewing Meyer’s feedback, as well as other similar stories, so they can take a more sensitive approach in the future.