"During our regular code push early Wednesday evening, a bug caused some misrouting to a small number of users for a short period of time," a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement.
One Wall Street Journal editor reported receiving emails from about 100 starting around 8:30pm on Wednesday and was later temporarily unable to access his Facebook account. Facebook removed all but two of the messages; however, many had already been forward to a third-party email account, where they could not be deleted.
The company said that its engineers diagnosed the problems "moments after it began" and have since resolved the problem. Facebook would not say how many users were affected.
The embarrassing gaffe is not the first time that company has sent private information to others. In March 2008, a bug in the Facebook software made it possible for people to publicly view photos that members had designated as private.
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