Facebook fail! (Chat is back up now!)

Did you notice you can’t use the Facebook chat today and it was down for maintenance. Well the actual fact behind that is that it has been disabled for now following a report of a bug that allowed users to access and view friend’s live chats and other information.

The access was possible through the privacy settings and was also reported by Tech crunch reporter Steve O’Hear who had a video made.  

The hack can be accessed when you use “Preview my profile” feature in the privacy settings to view how your profile appears to any given Facebook friend.  The bug let you look at those user’s live chats and friend requests.

The chat was fixed at about 12:30 central time which indicates that the bug must have been fixed.

However Facebook updated its page saying, “Chat is unavailable as we work quickly to fix a bug reported to us. It should return to normal soon. Because of the bug, people could view friends’ chat messages and friend requests for a limited amount of time if they manipulated the “preview my profile” feature in a specific way. We’ve fixed that issue and took down Chat as soon as we became aware of it. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Isn’t it amazing how a little piece of code could do so much damage and create privacy issues.