The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.

If authentic, this may constitute one of the biggest and most significant Facebook data dump to date.

Update – 5 October: The forum seller has today responded and denied the scam accusations, continuing to claim that the data is real. The seller commented they are willing to cooperate with administrators of the forum to prove the authenticity of the data.

Yesterday, a number of forum posters accused the seller of not delivering the promised data after payment was made.

Important Clarification: This is completely unrelated to the global Facebook outage experienced on 4 October 2021.

Several websites and Twitter accounts incorrectly attribute the 4 October Facebook outage to this alleged data leak.

Further Clarification: It's alleged that the data was obtained by scraping publicly available data shared by users. Several media outlets and Twitter users misinterpret this to have resulted due to a hack or data breach, which is not the case.

It is seemingly unrelated to an earlier 2021 Facebook data dump, where 500 million users were affected.