Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in the world: has suffered a major setback. The European Commission's Privacy Regulator on Friday fined Mark Zuckerberg's giant tech company Meta more than $100 million for a security lapse related to Facebook users' passwords. The Irish Data Protection Commission said in its order that after investigating the matter, it has imposed a fine of 91 million euros, or $101.6 million, on the American company Meta.

The European Commission regulator began the investigation in 2019

The European Commission regulator began investigating the matter in 2019. At that time Meta reported to the Commission that passwords of some Facebook users were inadvertently stored internally. This means that those passwords could be easily discovered by Facebook employees.

What statement did Meta give in its clarification

Graham Doyle, the commission's deputy commissioner, said users' passwords should not be stored without a code because of the risk of misuse. Meta, in its comment on the decision, said the 'mistake' was caught in a security review and the company took immediate action to fix it.

No evidence of misuse of password

"There is no evidence that these passwords were misused or improperly accessed. We engaged meaningfully with the Irish Data Protection Commission during their investigation into this matter," the company said in a statement. 

Different companies of Meta have already been fined

This latest fine has been imposed on Mark Zuckerberg's company Meta, which operates social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Earlier, Instagram was fined 405 million euros for mishandling the data of teenagers, WhatsApp was fined 55 million euros and Meta was fined 1.2 billion euros for sending data transatlantic.