The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a hackers forum.

This breach of privacy comes amid the global downtime being experienced by all Facebook-owned social media apps.

Privacy Affairs reports that data put up for sale includes the Facebook users’ names, emails, location, gender, phone number, user identification and other personal information.

The report noted that the hackers said the data was gotten by scraping instead of hacking or compromising individual users’ accounts.

Scraping is done when publicly available data is collected and organized into databases. As a result, hackers can make use of the collated information to carry out cyber attacks.

There has been a widely reported inability to access the services since Monday afternoon after a yet to be identified hacker nuked the DNS A; an address file that holds an IP address of the domain name and AAA records for Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.

This development comes as the social media giant is experiencing worldwide outages.

In an attempt to assure users that things are being fixed, Facebook has had to rely on Twitter to pass that information.