A late Wednesday malfunction with the Facebook software update, which, for a “short time” resulted in the sending of the email messages to wrong recipients, has raised privacy-related concerns on the social networking site.

Confirming the glitch, a Facebook spokesperson said in a Thursday e-mail: “During our regular code push yesterday evening, a bug caused some misrouting to a small number of users for a short period of time. Our engineers diagnosed the problem moments after it began and worked diligently to get everything back in its rightful place. While they fixed the issue, affected users were not able to access the site.”

Refraining from commenting on either the number of Facebook users affected by the problem or the duration for which the problem lasted, the spokesperson said that the investigations into the matter were still going on.

Meanwhile, among the Facebook users who reported the problem, Pablo Torre said that, at around 8:30 p. m. Wednesday, he started receiving messages that were ‘clearly not meant for him.’ Saying that he received “well over
100” wrongly-directed emails in nearly one-and-a-half hours, Torre said that he was “curious” to know how Facebook would deal with the problem.

The latest Facebook email glitch yet again draws attention to the privacy policies of popular sites that allow sharing of personal information over the Web, and raises questions about their ability to protect users’ data.