Facebook glitch revealed private chats

By Hibah Yousuf, staff reporter


NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Facebook said on Wednesday it has found a bug that made some instant message conversation visible to a user's entire list of friends. The site shut down its chat service to fix the problem.

The problem emerged from what was intended to be an enhanced privacy feature. The new tool allows users to preview how their profile appears to other users.

On Wednesday, many users began complaining that they could see live chats of the Facebook friend they were setting their profile for, as well as pending friend requests.

On its own Facebook page, the social network said the glitch occurred "for a limited amount of time if [users] manipulated the 'preview my profile' feature in a specific way."

About an hour after announcing the bug, Facebook said it fixed the problem and restored the chat function.

"When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function," the company said. "Chat is now back up and running. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented."

CNNMoney staff writer David Goldman contributed to this report.  To top of page

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