Former Meta employee accused of downloading 30,000 personal photos from Facebook

The company reported that it discovered the leak more than a year ago, after which the employee was immediately fired and the information was handed over to law enforcement agencies. The police clarified that in November 2025, a man about 30 years old was detained on suspicion of unauthorized access to data. He was later released on bail and is due to appear at the station again in May. The investigation is being carried out by the cybercrime department, which joined the case after a signal from the US FBI. Meta also said it notified affected users and strengthened security measures. The incident is the latest in a series of security problems facing the company.

In November 2022, the Irish data protection regulator, the Data Protection Commission, imposed a fine of €265 million on Meta for a leak that exposed the personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users to the public domain. Later, in September 2024, the same regulator found that Meta had mistakenly stored some user passwords unencrypted within its systems. For this violation, the company received an additional fine of 91 million euros.