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Klarna says ‘self-inflicted’ blunder exposed user accounts

Klarna says ‘self-inflicted’ blunder exposed user accounts
Klarna said human error exposed the data of about 90,000 users.

Klarna said a human error Thursday caused data of thousands of customers to be exposed to the wrong user, forcing the company to shut down the buy-now-pay-later site temporarily.

The Swedish company said a network update led to an error that affected app users. The "self-inflicted incident" lasted about a half hour and affected roughly 90,000 Klarna users, the company said.

"The bug led to random user data being exposed to the wrong user when accessing our user interfaces," Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in a blog post.

Siemiatkowski said the data access was "entirely random" and did not involve "data containing card or bank details."

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.

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