The Silicon Review ^Asia

Social media behemoth Facebook apologises for another privacy breach. This time a bug temporarily unblocked previously blocked users.

Reeling from its worst privacy crisis, Facebook said Monday that it was notifying over eight hundred thousand users about the bug.

A statement issued by the company said that bug was active for eight days between May 29 and June 5.

Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, in a blog post, said some blocked users couldn’t view posts that the person who blocked them shared with friends, but they could have seen things that person shared.

“We know that the ability to block someone is important – and we’d like to apologize and explain what happened,” Egan said in the post.

The company, as per the statement, said 83 percent of users impacted by the bug had one person temporarily unblocked. A user who was unblocked during that time may have been able to talk to the person who blocked them on Messenger.

However, it’s learnt that the issue has been resolved, and all previous settings have been reinstated.

A user who is typically blocked on Facebook cannot view posts on your profile, chat with you on Messenger or add you as a friend.