A minor bug in the two-factor authentication system of Facebook has caused the database to send non-security related notifications to millions of users worldwide. As per reports, users who have used this security feature to attach their mobile numbers with their accounts have received SMS from the company and those who have chosen to respond to these notifications, saw them appearing as status updates on their accounts for everyone to see.
Confirming this news, Facebook has stated that a bug has indeed affected many users and it is already working on a fix to resolve this issue. “It was not our intention to send non-security-related SMS notifications to these phone numbers, and I am sorry for any inconvenience these messages might have caused,” Alex Stamos, Chief Security Officer of Facebook said in a statement while responding to the news.
He also stated “For years, before the ubiquity of smartphones, we supported posting to Facebook via text message, but this feature is less useful these days. As a result, we are working to deprecate this functionality soon,”. The security team of Facebook is reportedly working to fix this issue really soon through an update.
Mr. Alex Stamos has also said that it was a major bug that has caused the database of the system to send text messages to random users that are not security related in nature. It was also because of this particular bug, that some of the messages got posted on the accounts of some of the users as status updates. He also said that this was not an intentional decision to post these messages as status updates.
Until Facebook rolls out a fix for this issue, the users affected by the bug may dive into Settings and then scroll to Notifications and turn them off to prevent the bug affected database from sending any more text messages to the users.
