Facebook have today announced that they have suffered a data breach, following an attack on its network which may have led to information of 50 million users being exposed to third party attackers.

Facebook discovered the data breach earlier in the week, and an investigation had found that the third parties exploited the social networks ‘View As’ feature which allowed them to take over user accounts.

Facebook do not know where, or who the third parties are – but are investigating with law enforcement. They’re at the early stages in their investigation.

The official statement from Facebook reads:

To protect your security, we may have recently logged you out of your Facebook account. On September 25th, 2018, we discovered an attack on our system where attackers stole Facebook access tokens. Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that attackers could then have used to take over other people’s accounts. By logging people out, we prevent attackers from using the tokens to access these accounts.

We don’t know yet if anyone’s Facebook information was accessed, but we wanted to let you know what we’re doing to protect your account. We’re continuing to investigate the situation and have informed law enforcement about the issue. If we find that more people have been affected, we’ll immediately log them out and then let them know what happened.

If you’ve been logged out, you will need to log back into your account to continue using Facebook or other apps you log into using Facebook. There’s no need for anyone to change their passwords. But if you’re having trouble logging back into your account, learn what you can do.