Millions of Facebook Users Have Had Their Personal Information Breached

Over 50 million Facebook users have had their personal information breached.

“We’re taking it really seriously,” Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO and founder said in a public statement regarding the new breach. “We have a major security effort at the company that hardens all of our surfaces.”

He continued, “I’m glad we found this. But it definitely is an issue that this happened in the first place.”

Over 90 million Facebook users were logged out of their accounts on Friday morning and forced to log back in — a standard procedure when the company has a security breach.

Facebook is still in the beginning stages of an investigation and has yet to identify the attackers.

“We also don’t know who’s behind these attacks or where they’re based,” Facebook’s vice president of product management, Guy Rosen, wrote in a public statement.

“We’re working hard to better understand these details — and we will update this post when we have more information, or if the facts change. In addition, if we find more affected accounts, we will immediately reset their access tokens.”

The hackers used a glitch in the company’s code that allowed them to take over people’s accounts. The bug was in a new “View as” feature from the social media company. The feature allows users to view their own profiles as if they were different people. The feature was meant to be a new security measure for the site.

Facebook has reportedly addressed and fixed the vulnerability.

The company confirmed that the personal information hacked included users’ age, place of residence, and gender.

The company said no credit card information was breached — and it doesn’t know whether private messages were hacked.

The breach comes at a bad time for the social media company as it continues to deal with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed that users’ personal information was being shared and used improperly.

“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t, then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg said earlier this year when addressing the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The company has also been accused recently of suppressing conservative voices while propping up liberal ones.

Trump supporter Alex Jones was recently banned from Facebook, and conservative commentators Diamond and Silk previously accused the site of censorship after their content was labeled “unsafe.”

This latest information breach could not come at a worse time for Facebook.

In a year that is supposed to be about rebuilding trust with users, the social media company is continuously being revealed as a biased and unsafe place for users to store their information and share their thoughts.

Facebook and Zuckerberg’s uphill journey to regaining public trust just became even steeper.