Facebook exposes millions of passwords: Here’s how you can protect your account

Facebook on Wednesday disclosed a critical flaw on its social networking platform that exposed millions of users passwords to its employees. The company said the passwords were stored in plain text format on its internal servers. Facebook said it has now fixed the glitch.

Facebook in a blog post said it discovered the passwords in “readable format” during a routine security review in January. The social media giant also assures that the passwords did not leak outside the company, and were not misused in any way. It’s also not clear how long the passwords were out in the open.

Affected users

Facebook’s security flaw exposed passwords of millions of users. This primarily affected “hundreds of millions” of Facebook Lite users, “tens of millions” of Facebook users, and also “tens of thousands” of Instagram users. Instagram users who login to the app through Facebook are likely to be affected.