high severity August 01, 2019 · 3 min read

Facebook — 509 Million Phone Numbers Tied to Real Names (2019, published 2021)

If you are a customer of Facebook, here’s what’s now in circulation.

Roughly 20% of Facebook made freely downloadable in April 2021, scraped through a contact-import weakness Facebook says it fixed in August 2019. The value of the data is not passwords — there are none — it is that it welds a phone number to a real name. Ireland fined Meta 265 million euro over it.

A phone number linking outward to a name, birthday and employer

What happened

In April 2021 a data set covering 509,458,528 Facebook users — roughly a fifth of the platform — was posted for free download on a hacking forum. Facebook's position is that the data was obtained by abusing a contact-importer weakness that it fixed in August 2019, which is why the catalogue dates the incident to 2019 rather than to the day it became public.

Named in this incident?

You can’t unleak data. You can take away what it’s worth.

A leaked record is where it starts, not where it ends. What turns it into your front door is the look-up sites publishing your address beside your name — and those are what an AI reads when somebody asks about you. The free scan shows you both. We write to 580 companies.

See what is exposed about you — free scan →

Not ready yet? Run a free breach check on this email

We’ll check it against 13.1B+ leaked records right now — no account needed. Continuous monitoring & alerts are part of Protection.

In November 2022 Ireland's Data Protection Commission concluded its inquiry and fined Meta 265 million euro, covering data processing through Facebook Search and the Facebook and Instagram Contact Importer tools between May 2018 and September 2019. The finding was a failure to build in appropriate technical safeguards — not a failure to stop an intrusion.

A scrape is not a hack, and the difference changes your response

Nobody broke into Facebook's servers. The contact importer was a feature: it let you upload phone numbers to find friends. Run at scale against generated number ranges, it turned into a lookup that converted phone numbers into profiles.

The consequence for you is specific. There were no passwords in this data, so changing your Facebook password does nothing about it. Only about 2.5 million of the half-billion records contained an email address at all. Most records held a phone number, a name and a gender, with many also carrying date of birth, location, relationship status and employer.

You’ve used today’s 5 free articles · resets tomorrow

Create a free account to keep reading

The rest of this article comes straight back — free, no card, nothing you’ve already read goes away. Then see whether your own data is exposed too: the scan on this site is free with or without an account, and the account is what keeps the result after the emailed link expires.

Free reader account

No card, no charge. You read the blog without a limit — every article, no daily count — and it saves your exposure-scan results so you can open them again after the emailed link expires. We won’t email you anything else unless you tick the box asking us to. The next step shows what the paid plans add — free stays the first option on it.

Create a free account →

Free accounts are for personal use. If you’re reading for a company, that’s Signals (terms).

Reading this for a company?

GalaxyWarden Signals watches the organisations you name and emails you when one of them actually discloses — SEC 8-K Item 1.05 filings and corroborated breach records, with a JSON API. It monitors companies, not people: it does not scan you and does not remove your personal data.

See GalaxyWarden Signals →

Or make a free reader account first

Already have an account? Log in

What the free scan actually returns

Sample resultyou@email.comIllustrative — not a real person

Found on people-search siteswe remove these

These listings are live, public, and legal to remove — and removing them is what we do.

value redacted in this sampleage, relatives, address historySpokeo

value redacted in this samplephone, household, property recordsBeenVerified

value redacted in this sample580 companies checked

Found in breach recordsverifiedreported — unverified

Each record is labeled: confirmed breach data, or an attacker’s claim no one has verified.

verifiedvalue redacted in this samplepassword + phone · 2024telecom breach

unverifiedvalue redacted in this sampleclaimed in ransomware listing · 2026leak-site claim

Leaked data cannot be deleted from the internet — anyone claiming otherwise is lying. Broker listings can be removed. We do the second, and show you exactly what to fix from the first.

Report details & sourcing

Severity High contact details only, none of them permanent

Disclosed August 01, 2019

Last reviewed July 22, 2026

Affected 509.5M records

Data exposed Phone numbersNamesGendersDates of birthGeographic locationsRelationship statusesEmployersEmail addresses

By GalaxyWarden Threat Research · Editorial & sourcing standards

Editorial & sourcing policy

GalaxyWarden is a breach-monitoring service and news aggregator. We do not exfiltrate, host, purchase, or redistribute stolen data. Breach information is compiled from publicly accessible sources and threat-intelligence platforms, and is reported as claims attributed to their source. We promptly correct or remove material shown to be inaccurate — see our content & takedown policy or write to support@galaxywarden.com.

Related breaches

high February 25, 2019