Facebook says Instagram password is bigger than originally planned – Deadline

Facebook now indicates that millions of Instagram user passwords have been accidentally stored in a readable format on its servers, and not tens of thousands as originally thought.

Facebook revealed this new information in a blog post updated Thursday morning.

"Since posting this message, we have discovered additional journals of Instagram passwords stored in a readable format," said Facebook in its message. "We now estimate that this problem has affected millions of Instagram users. We will notify these users as we did the others. Our investigation determined that these stored passwords were not misused or used internally. "

On March 21, Facebook initially reported that "tens of thousands" of Instagram passwords had been affected.

In its March 21 blog post, Facebook said it discovered the user password problem as part of a current security review in January, while stressing that the passwords were "bad". 39; were visible to anyone outside Facebook and that they had not found any bad access to passwords. "We have corrected these issues and, as a precaution, we will notify everyone whose passwords have been stored in this manner," said Facebook.

Facebook has not indicated the number of people affected in its updated blog post.

Many government agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, are investigating the social media giant for its data collection and privacy practices.