It has been reported that the U. S. social networking site Facebook on Wednesday plugged a security bug that allowed people to monitor private chats and pending friend requests of others.

PC World has reported that Facebook had the problem fixed by 2 p. m. EDT.

Facebook said in a statement, "For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users' chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the 'preview my profile' feature of Facebook privacy settings. When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out for a fix, to take care of the visible friend requests, which is now complete."

It was further reported that Facebook did not say how many users were affected. (With Inputs from Agencies)