Yet another data breach? Amazon India accidentally leaks business reports of sellers

New Delhi: American e-commerce giant Amazon has once again witnessed a critical malfunction on its platform and this on its India website – www.amazon.in. According to initial reports, the US-based firm admitted that it faced a technical glitch on Sunday which has leaked some of the private financial information of its sellers to others. Reports suggest that sellers were given financial data of other vendors while they were downloading their monthly financial reports, which is a breach of competitive business data. However, confirming the malfunction, Amazon India said that as soon as the breach was identified, technical teams rushed towards resolving the issue. The company has not informed the total number of sellers affected by the glitch, Business Standard reported. Reportedly, the leaked data are the ones sellers can download during the eighth to the tenth of each month to file GST returns. The data consists of sellers’ information like sales volume across categories, orders processed, inventory and others. Amazon India has more than 4 lakh sellers on its platform and those affected were later provided with correct reports. “On Sunday, some sellers who attempted to download merchant tax reports for the month of December 2018 experienced a technical issue,” Business Standard quoted Amazon India as saying. “Our teams identified the issue and resolved it on priority and sellers were soon able to download the correct reports,” the company added. This is not for the first time that the e-tailer has been in the news for data breach issue. Even in December last year, it was reported that Amazon employees in India and the US were sharing internal company data with merchants. Soon as the issue came into light, Amazon dismissed several employees in both countries for accessing internal data. Amazon was in the news for yet another data breach in November 2018 when names and email addresses of several customers were exposed. However, the company did not disclose the total number of users affected from it and which sites of Amazon were impacted.