London, Mar 20: Facebook's chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has been summoned by a UK Parliamentary Committee probing the data breach of over 50 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics company.

Damian Collins, chairman of the UK Parliamentary Media Committee, sent a note addressed to the Facebook CEO, seeking his personal appearance before the panel.

"It is now time to hear from a senior Facebook executive with the sufficient authority to give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process. Given your commitment at the start of the New Year to 'fixing' Facebook, I hope that this representative will be you," Collins reportedly wrote.

The data breach case came to light after Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, provided details of the personal information extracted from over 50 million Facebook accounts.

The data is suspected to be used in swindling the voters' mood in favour of Donald Trump ahead of the ahead of the 2016 US presidential elections, and bolstering the 'leave sentiment' in Brexit referendum of UK.

Cambridge Analytica is partially owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American billionaire and a committed Republican donor.

The data on Facebook was allegedly stolen using an application prepared by Cambridge University's psychology professor Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who was reportedly paid a fee of $800,000 by Cambridge Analytica.

The application not only extracted data of 2,70,000 users who downloaded it, but also of those who were in their friend list.

Facebook, however, denies any lapse on its part, claiming the data was accessed from only those user who downloaded the application, accepting it's terms and conditions.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 20, 2018 09:09 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).