Facebook glitch exposes chat messages

Facebook on Wednesday temporarily shut down its online chat feature after a software glitch let people’s friends in the online community see each others’ private chat messages. “Chat is unavailable as we work quickly to fix a bug reported to us,” Facebook said in a message posted at the website. “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.” For peeks at the usually walled off information Facebook users had to manipulate a “preview my profile” feature in a particular way, according to Facebook. “We’ve fixed that issue and took down chat as soon as we became aware of it,” Facebook said in its message. “We apologise for the inconvenience.”