By Gabriella Licona

On Tuesday afternoon, Facebook’s engineering team discovered a security breach that has led to the exposure of nearly 50 million active accounts. On Thursday night, the Facebook team had alerted the law enforcement officials.

After announcing the news on Friday to the public, Facebook has asked over 90 million other accounts to shut down their accounts for their safety— the case is still an ongoing investigation. The Facebook newsroom announced that the attack was directed at a vulnerable feature of Facebook, their ‘View As’ section that allows users to view their profile as others see it.

The ‘View As’ feature had linked Facebook access tokens, digital codes that allow social media users to save their password and username credentials rather than logging in directly themselves. These digital codes have been revealed to said attackers, risking an estimated 100 million Facebook users’ information being out in the open.

As of recently, any names and whereabouts of the attackers remain unknown. Safety measures have been taken to protect any other personal information from other Facebook users. Facebook has removed the ‘View As’ feature as for right now and is currently working on repairing its weak spots.

Meanwhile, law enforcement officials state that the information of the 50 million users that have been affected by the attack have not been shared to the media. However, it is still unclear how deep the situation is based on the knowledge of the breach.

“We’re working hard to better understand these details — and we will update this post when we have more information, or if the facts change,” stated Guy Rosen, the VP of product management of Facebook.

The Mark Zuckerberg-led company is also taking precaution measures to ensure that no other private information of users is at risk of being used and that no other access tokens are exposed to hackers. The Facebook team has asked many users to consider visiting their ‘Help Center’ and ‘Security and Login’ page for their own safety.