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The code is being published on a hastily-assembled blog, whose sole entry is merely a cut-and-paste of the leaked Facebook source code.

Its publication has raised fears that users' privacy could be compromised, if hackers find a way around the system that blocks strangers from accessing members' profiles, many of which contain highly-personal data such as mobile

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phone numbers.

Facebook, however, insists that security has not been affected. "Some of Facebook's source code was exposed to a small number of users due to a bug on a single server that was misconfigured and then fixed immediately," a company spokesman told TechCrunch.com, who broke the story. "It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further."

However, TechCrunch claims the leak reveals critical details of how Facebook is coded, that could be valuable to potential hackers. "For instance, the structure doesn't follow any object oriented development practices, and it seems that the application is one large PHP file with a large number of custom functions living in the same namespace (they also seem to be using the Smarty templating engine," the site claims.