Amazon has voluntarily reset the passwords of an unknown number of accounts for fear they may have been leaked to a third party.
On Tuesday, 24 November, reports said several Amazon customers received an email from the company that stated their account passwords had been reset.
In the email, Amazon said: "It recently discovered that your password may have been improperly stored on your device or transmitted to Amazon in a way that could potentially expose it to a third party."
It also said that although Amazon has "no reason" to believe that the passwords were indeed improperly revealed to a third party, they issued a temporary password due to an "abundance of caution".
The email added, "We have corrected the issue to prevent this exposure."
In order to confirm the change, Amazon reportedly sent the same message to the customers' account manager on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk as well, ZDNet reported.
This isn't the first time that Amazon has force-reset account passwords. In 2010, the American retail giant asked its customers to change their passwords as many used the same password for several of their accounts.
"At Amazon we take your security and privacy very seriously. As part of our routine monitoring, we discovered a list of email address and password sets posted online. While the list was not Amazon-related, we know that many customers reuse their passwords on several websites. We believe your email address and password set was on that list. So we have taken the precaution of resetting your Amazon.com password," said the Amazon message.
Furthermore, only last week had Amazon introduced the two-factor/two-step authentication in its website. This verification process has been followed by several popular sites, including Google, Facebook and Apple, for long. However, Amazon has always kept its distance from it.
