At first glance, the Instagram security bug that was exploited to obtain celebrities' phone numbers and e-mail addresses appeared to be limited, possibly to a small number of celebrity accounts.

Now a database of 10,000 credentials published online Thursday night suggests the breach is much bigger. The database was provided by someone who e-mailed in response to Thursday's story, mentioned above, about the Instagram breach. The sender said he was able to scrape personal data belonging to 6 million users and was selling the data in a searchable website for $10 per query. The person provided a sample of 10,000 of those records.

An Instagram bug allowed hackers to access contact phone numbers and email addresses for high-profile users, the company said today. The bug was discovered recently in Instagram’s application programming interface, or API, which the service uses to communicate with other apps.

Instagram declined to specify which users had been targeted, but the news comes two days after hackers accessed the account of its most-followed user, Selena Gomez, and posted nude pictures of her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber. The company has notified all of its verified account holders of the possible leak of their contact information. 

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, VK, Google's Picasa and Youtube were handing over user data access to a Chicago-based Startup which then sold this data to law enforcement agencies for surveillance purposes.

Government records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that the big technology corporations gave "special access" to Geofeedia. Geofeedia is a controversial social media monitoring tool that pulls social media feeds via APIs and other means of access and then makes it searchable and accessible to its clients, who can search by location or keyword to quickly find recently posted and publicly available contents.

Mark Zuckerberg has been ordered to appear in an Iranian court to answer complaints the Facebook-owned applications Instagram and WhatsApp violate individuals' privacy.

The semi-official news agency INSA quoted Ruhollah Momen Nasab, an official with the paramilitary Basij force, as saying that the judge in the south of the country had also ordered the two services be blocked. Facebook owns both Instagram and WhatsApp. It is unlikely Mr Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, will appear in court because the US and Iran do not have an extradition treaty. Similar rulings have been issued in recent years and not been carried out. A separate Iranian court ordered last week that Instagram be blocked over privacy concerns.

An Iranian court ordered the photo-sharing app Instagram be blocked in the Islamic Republic.

The agency said a court order, stemming from a private lawsuit, had been given to Iran's Ministry of Telecommunications to ban the site. However users in the capital, Tehran, still could access the application.

The decision to block the photo-sharing app Instagram was accepted by the court due to privacy concerns, the latest in a series of websites to be banned in the Islamic Republic. Citizens of the country complained that the social network breaks confidentiality of their data.