This may be a good day to change your password

File photo by JMiks / Shutterstock

A Tumblr Staff post alerted over 174 million blogs in the billion-dollar microblogging site on April 8th to change their password.

The alert was due to a technological threat called “heartbleed.”

The post reads:

“Bad news. A major vulnerability, known as “Heartbleed,” has been disclosed for the technology that powers encryption across the majority of the internet. That includes Tumblr.

We have no evidence of any breach and, like most networks, our team took immediate action to fix the issue.

But this still means that the little lock icon (HTTPS) we all trusted to keep our passwords, personal emails, and credit cards safe, was actually making all that private information accessible to anyone who knew about the exploit.

This might be a good day to call in sick and take some time to change your passwords everywhere—especially your high-security services like email, file storage, and banking, which may have been compromised by this bug.

You’ll be hearing more in the news over the coming days. Take care.”

As of March 2014, Tumblr recorded a total of 174.2 million hosted blogs that create at least 110.2 million posts each day. In May 2013, internet giant Yahoo! acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cold hard cash.

Several major websites have bee affected by this threat and account owners are advised to change their passwords to be safe. For a comprehensive list of possibly compromised sites, check out Mashable.com’s post.

Better safe than sorry.