What is FacebookUpdate.exe? Is it A Virus?

Facebook has been notorious of late with lots of Facebook Scam doing the rounds of the social networking site. Staying away from those Facebook Spam is not easy, however, we have instructions on how you can stay safe on How to Identify and Avoid Facebook Scams and also about removing apps from Facebook and Avoiding Facebook Lifejacking and Clickjacking scams.

We recently received a question asking about a new executable called FacebookUpdate.exe running on a Windows PC and whether it was a virus or not? Turns out that it is not a virus and is an official software from Facebook which is used to update the software which is locally installed on a Windows PC.

Quite recently Facebook introduced a new group chat and video calling along with Group video chat with social hangouts. Facebook asked users to download a software to their local PC in order to use the video calling feature in Facebook.

Source: reuters.com

If you have downloaded the said software from Facebook, you will notice that a file called FacebookUpdate.exe is added to the startup on your Windows PC. The location of the file is in your user profile folder and runs with some parameters as shown below

%USERPROFILE%\Local\Facebook\Update\FacebookUpdate.exe /c /nocrashserver

This service is totally safe and is only used to update the software which was installed by Facebook. If you feel threatened by it, you can disable it without problems. If you are not sure how to disable services or startup items, read our earlier guides and articles.