Facebook Apologizes for Accidentally Making 14 Million Users Posts Public

The gaffes continue for Facebook and this time it’s apologizing for a software bug that left people’s posts exposed. The bug, which occurred between May 18 and May 22 when the platform was testing new features, made up to 14 million users default setting for sharing content as “public” — which allowed everyone on the internet to see the posts.

Fast Company reports that Facebook will now send a notification to those users about reviewing posts from that period, making sure that they actually want the content they published on the aforementioned dates visibly to the public. Facebook’s chief privacy officer Erin Egan released a statement saying the following:

“We’d like to apologize for this mistake. We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. We have fixed this issue and starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time. To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before–and they could still choose their audience just as they always have.”

While assumed to be a general error for the company, the timing is unfortunate with all of the privacy-related issues for Facebook at this point in time.

In related news, Facebook recently dropped the Pride button.