Facebook has officially confirmed that its social network website has suffered a bug which LED to leakage of contact information of around 6 million users.
Admitting the bug, Facebook in a blog post said, “We recently received a report to our White Hat program regarding a bug that may have allowed some of a person’s contact information (email or phone number) to be accessed by people who either had some contact information about that person or some connection to them.”
“”We’ve concluded that approximately 6 million Facebook users had email addresses or telephone numbers shared. There were other email addresses or telephone numbers included in the downloads, but they were not connected to any Facebook users or even names of individuals” the social network further added.
Facebook though has now claimed to have solved the problem. Facebook has also said that no harm has been done so far due to the leak in information.
The problem was caused due to the presence of a bug in the DYI (Download Your Information) tool. Acting quickly to resolve the issue the tool has been suspended for the time being as work continues on the same for fixing the bug and the issues it caused.
However most users use their names in their email addresses and this could lead to potential risk. The reports however have not started cropping up as of now but they might any time soon as the danger still lurks as data might be available with some users.