'Bug'

Facebook privacy bug 'affects 14 million users'

The glitch set a user’s post to be shared to "everyone", even if a user had previously chosen a more restricted option, such as “friends of friends”.

“We’d like to apologise for this mistake,” said Erin Egan, Facebook’s head of privacy.

Users who may have been affected will be notified on the site’s newsfeed.

"We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts,” Ms Egan said.