The privacy blunder was first discovered by Gawker -- which estimates that e-mail addresses were exposed for 30 minutes late Tuesday night -- and has been confirmed by Facebook.
A representative from Facebook explained the glitch in the following statement sent to us via e-mail:
"Last night during Facebook’s regular code push, a bug caused hidden e-mail addresses to be visible briefly. The bug was detected within minutes and corrected."
While bugs are to be expected from startups, glitches occurring within such a massive site are off-putting. Facebook has a responsibility to maintain user privacy, especially now that there are more than 400 million members who trust the site with personally identifiable information like e-mail addresses (which we hand over as soon as we sign up).