Facebook Says Password Leak Affected ‘Millions’ of Instagram Users

Facebook had acknowledged a password security lapse nearly four weeks ago.

Millions more Instagram users were affected by a password security lapse that parent company Facebook acknowledged nearly four weeks ago.

The social media giant said in late March that it had inadvertently stored passwords in plain text, making it possible for its thousands of employees to search them. It said the passwords were stored on internal company servers, where no outsiders could access them.

Facebook said in a blog post on Thursday, 18 April, that it estimates that “millions” of Instagram users were affected by the lapse, instead of the “tens of thousands” it had originally reported.

“We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users. We will be notifying these users as we did the others,” the updated post said adding that “these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed”.

It had also said in March that the issue affected “hundreds of millions” of Facebook Lite users and millions of Facebook users. Facebook Lite is designed for people with older phones or slow internet connections.

(With inputs from AP)