The California-based company reaches an estimated 2.7 billion people across the globe with its core social network, messaging applications, and Instagram.

Facebook has reportedly admitted that it stored millions of user account passwords in plain text on its internal servers, a faux pas that left them readable by the social network giant’s employees. As per trusted sources, the blunder comes to light following a series of controversies centered on whether Facebook appropriately safeguards the data and privacy of its users.

Vice-President of engineering, security, and privacy at Facebook, Pedro Canahuati reportedly stated in a blog post that the passwords were not visible to anyone apart from company employees and it has found no evidence till data that anyone internally hijacked or improperly accessed the passwords. Canahuati further added that the faux pas was revealed during a routine security review early this year,

It is being said that the social networking behemoth is anticipated to notify tens of thousands of Instagram users, hundreds of Facebook Lite users, and tens of millions of other Facebook users whose passwords might have been compromised.

Security news website KrebsOnSecurity.com quoted an unnamed Facebook source as stating an internal investigation revealed that the account passwords of as many as 600 million users were stored in plain text files searchable by more than 20,000 employees. According to a report by The Hindu, Facebook’s admission of the gaffe came after the report by KrebsOnSecurity.com was made public.

Reportedly, elected officials, investigators, and regulators across the world have already been concerned about the data sharing practices of Facebook which has a user base of around 2 billion. Facebook’s handling of user information has been a flashpoint for controversy since it admitted in the year 2018 that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, utilized its app that may have compromised the private data of 87 million users.

For the record, the California-based company reaches an estimated 2.7 billion people with its core social network, messaging applications, and Instagram.