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Facebook appears to be having a privacy crisis. Earlier this morning, The Register reported that some people were able to see other Facebook users' private message inboxes. Blogger and IBM employee Matt Dibb reported Facebook exposing other people's email addresses on its login page. VentureBeat speculates that a bad update to Facebook's codebase got rolled out — and today's supposed "upgrade" was actually Facebook's panicked attempt to fix the problem. Since Facebook's fine-tuned privacy controls are a big selling point, this mucked-up code episode is especially embarrassing. Mark Zuckerberg, if you can take a break from counting your fictional billions of dollars, care to take a look at your site's code? Update: Facebook says it has fixed the problem. The statement, after the jump.

Says Facebook:

This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Facebook's Brandee Barker clarifies that the word "security" above, refers only to external security. Obviously, the bug caused the site to breach the security of its users' private information, and expose it to others — but outside hackers were not involved.