Facebook says more than 800,000 users may have been affected by a bug that unblocked people they previously had blocked.
The company said in a blog post that the bug was active between May 29 and June 5. While a person who was unblocked by this bug could not see content users shared with their friends, they could have seen things that were posted to a wider audience. They would also have been able to send messages to the user, something a blocked person usually can not do.
In the blog post, chief privacy officer Erin Egan said that this only affected people the users had blocked, not people the users had unfriended, and also that 83 per cent of people affected by the bug only had one person they had blocked temporarily unblocked.
“We know that the ability to block someone is important, and we’d like to apologise,” Egan said.
“This issue has now been fixed and everyone has been blocked again. People who were affected will get a notification on Facebook encouraging them to check their blocked list.”
It’s the second software bug in less than a month that the company has notified users about. In June, Facebook disclosed that a software bug led some users to post publicly by default regardless of their previous settings. That bug affected as many as 14 million users over several days in May.
