Facebook security bug lets you eavesdrop on your friends’ chats

On Wednesday morning, a Facebook security flaw allowed users for a few hours to get a glimpse at their friends’ private chats and their their latest pending friend-requests. Here is a video from TechCrunch, demonstrating the bug in action:

Upon being notified about the flaw, Facebook immediately started to rectify the situation and disabled the chat function for a while. They posted the following statement on their official Facebook page:

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.

By now, all the bugs have been dealt with, and the chat function is available again.