The social networking site, which has more than 400 million users worldwide, took down the chat feature for a number of hours while engineers worked to fix a software bug.
Private chats between some users were briefly viewable on a privacy settings feature that allows a user to see how their profile will appear to other users.
The problem was first reported by the TechCrunch blog.
A spokesman for Facebook said:
"For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users' chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the 'preview my profile' feature of Facebook privacy settings.
"When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete.
"We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented."
The company also issued a statement on the site explaining the absence of the chat feature to users.
"Chat is unavailable as we work quickly to fix a bug reported to us," it said. "It should return to normal soon… We apologise for the inconvenience."
At one point, some 5,000 people said they "liked" Facebook's comment.
The mistake happened as Facebook comes under increasing scrutiny from privacy campaigners.
It changed the way users' personal profile information is treated last month. It now requires that data about an individual's home town, education and hobbies be tied to public pages devoted to those topics.
Four US senators wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, last week to take issue with some of the changes.
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