Watch your email: Facebook may be telling you your password was exposed

Facebook is warning hundreds of millions of customers that their passwords may have been seen by employees. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)

Facebook is warning hundreds of millions of customers that their passwords may have been seen by employees. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)

Hundreds of millions of Facebook, Facebook Lite and Instagram users are expected to receive emails from Facebook that their passwords may have been seen by the company’s employees.

When conducting a routine security review in January, Facebook found that some user passwords were stored in a readable format within internal data storage systems, according to a blog post from Facebook’s vice president of Engineering, Security and Privacy Pedro Canahuati.

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Normally passwords are stored in a coded format that employees can’t read.

“To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them,” he said.

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Facebook has fixed the issues and will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users and tens of thousands of Instagram users as a precaution, Canahuati said.

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