The news feeds of thousands of Facebook users were flooded with violent and pornographic photographs after an attack by hackers, a spokeswoman for the social networking site has confirmed.
Users around the world were confronted with the videos and images - some of which were doctored to show pornographic pictures of celebrities including teen star Justin Bieber.
A Facebook spokeswoman in the UK said that the website had seen an increased amount of spam in the last 24 hours but it was "under control".
Users were tricked into pasting malicious software into their browsers, which in turn resulted in the sharing of offensive content, she said.
"Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us," the spokeswoman said.
"Recently, we experienced a spam attack that exploited a browser vulnerability. Our team responded quickly and we have eliminated most of the spam caused by this attack.
"We are now working to improve our systems to better defend against similar attacks in the future."
The spokeswoman said that no user data or accounts were compromised during the cyber attack.
She said that users should never copy and paste "unknown code" into an address bar, to always use an up-to-date browser and to report any suspicious content.
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