Facebook (FB  ) is experiencing one of the biggest privacy scandals in its history. A report released Saturday by The New York Times showed that political data firm Cambridge Analytica was able to improperly harvest the data of millions of Facebook users without their full consent to create targeted advertisements aimed at ensuring Donald Trump won the 2016 election.

Cambridge Analytica was said to gather information of more than 50 million users without their permission, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social networks history.

According to The New York Times report, "the researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists claimed, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew."

The data included details on user's identities, friend networks, and likes. It involved only a small percentage of users that agreed to release any information to third parties at all.

Cambridge Analytica, founded by Stephen K. Bannon and Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, used the Facebook data to develop methods that it claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior. They believed they could sway voters in their favor based on gathering this information about users. Members of the Republican party "were intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America's culture and rewire its politics."

U.K. professor Aleksandr Kogan, the lead data scientist in constructing the app and gathering the data sold to Cambridge Analytica, did not have the rights to sell the data to the firm, according to Facebook, and only gave vague information to users that this information was being used for academic purposes.

A statement from Facebook showed that by late 2015, the company had found out that the information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time is failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

Facebook said on Friday it had learned in 2015 that a Kogan lied to the company and violated its policies by passing data to Cambridge Analytica from a psychology testing application he had built.

Following days of silence from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has finally spoken out about the data leak, granting an apology to all its users and confirming that it will take all necessary steps to ensure its users information is secure and private. Facebook regrets not letting its users know of the event earlier and it would take action and suspend the accounts of actors who were involved in the incident. The apology was not enough to save Facebook: it has lost over $50 billion in market value since the news broke, and shares have dropped more than 10%.

The most recent scandal also comes amid an already tumultuous year for Facebook. They have been under attack over Russia's alleged use of Facebook tools to sway U.S. voters with divisive and false news posts before and after the 2016 election.