According to officials of the company said late Friday that the daily deals site LivingSocial has been attacked by hackers and 50 million customers data has been breached.
LivingSocial is based in Washington, D.C. and now has more than 70 million members around the world. The company is part-owned by Amazon.com Inc.
Some users who tried to log in on Friday got a message that says "unauthorized access," and were told to reset their passwords.
Hackers may have accessed names, email addresses, encrypted passwords and the dates of birth for some users.
On the homepage of LivingSocial following messages are displayed "important notice for customers learn more & faq's, if you haven't already updated your LivingSocial password, please update it now".
LivingSocial is also contacting customers who closed accounts, because it still has their information stored in databases.
Users in the United States, Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Southern Europe and Latin America are hit by the cyberattack as all LivingSocial users had some data stored on the hacked server. Customers in South Korea, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand were not affected as those countries use TicketMonster and Ensogo, which are on different systems., Andrew Weinstein said the spokesman of LivingSocial.
The firm started sending emails to customers Friday afternoon urging them they should change their site passwords.
"We recently experienced a cyber-attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers. We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue," LivingSocial CEO Tim O'Shaughnessy said in an email.
