Millions of Facebook users’ passwords were accessible by up to 20,000 employees of the site, it’s been reported. Security researcher Brian Kebs broke the news about the data protection failures, which saw up to 600 million passwords stored in plain text. In a statement, Facebook said it had now resolved a “glitch” that had stored passwords on its internal network. In a detailed expose, Mr Krebs said a Facebook source had told him about "security failures" that had let developers create applications that logged and stored the passwords without encrypting them. Commenting on Mr Krebs's story Facebook engineer, Scott Renfro said an internal investigation started after Facebook had uncovered the logs had not revealed any "signs of misuse". Facebook said it had discovered the issue in January as part of a routine security review, and that the investigation showed most people affected were users of Facebook Lite, which tends to be used in countries where the internet is slow. "We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users," the company told Reuters. The news caps a long period of trouble for Facebook over the way it handles and protects user data.

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