The world's most popular social network is thought to have deliberately crashed its app on smartphones in an attempt to test how loyal its users are. 

According to tech website The Information, the US firm secretly pushed out artificial errors within the Android app that would automatically crash it for hours at a time.

The experiment was designed to test at what point a Facebook user would give-up and ditch the Facebook app from their device all-together.

It's though that at no point during test were the users told they were being targeted.

Speaking anonymously to The Information, a source familiar with the test said Facebook was never able to reach this threshold.

"People never stopped coming back," the source said.

The test was performed a number of years ago and only happened once.

It appears Facebook wanted to see whether users would abandon the social network should Google one day remove Facebook's apps from its Play Store marketplace.

However, former Facebook data scientist JJ Maxwell defended the move, saying tests like these are "hugely valuable" to the company.

Admittedly, Facebook is not alone as many tech firms quietly test new features on users.

Google famously tried 41 different shades of blue on its homepage, to see which promoted the best response from its users.

But tweaking a shade of blue is very different to testing the loyalty of your users by deliberately crashing their access to the service.This latest Facebook revelation comes after a controversial experiment which took place in 2014.

During the test, Facebook manipulated users' emotions using the News Feed.

Some users were sent an onslaught of upsetting or negative posts, while others were given a barrage of positive posts to another group.

A number of critics highlighted the potential dangers of this type of manipulation, following the publication of two separate studies from the University of Houston which linked Facebook to depression.

(dailystar.co.uk)