SAN FRANCISCO - FACEBOOK on Wednesday temporarily shut down its online chat feature after a software glitch let people's friends in the online community see each others' private chat messages.
For a 'limited period of time' chat messages and pending friend requests could be made visible to friends, according to Facebook.
For peeks at the usually walled-off information, Facebook users had to manipulate a 'preview my profile' feature in a particular way, according to Facebook. 'When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function,' a Facebook spokesman said in an email response to an AFP inquiry. 'We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests.'
Chat was back in action for most Facebook users by 1900 GMT (3am Thursday Singapore time) and it was expected to be working across the website after.
'We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented,' the Facebook spokesman said. The software glitch struck as the world's top online social-networking service is increasingly scrutinised regarding the privacy of members.
Slightly more than half of adult users of social networks have posted 'risky personal information' such as birth dates or children's photos to profile pages, according to a Consumer Reports survey titled 'Social Insecurity'. The survey indicated that 23 per cent of Facebook's users 'either didn't know that the site offered privacy controls or chose not to use them.' --AFP
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