Google acknowledged on Monday on his blog the existence of a security breach

Google acknowledged on Monday on its blog the existence of a security breach that had exposed the private data of up to 500,000 accounts and announced that it closes Google+ temporarily.

"We discovered and immediately solved this error in March 2018," the computer giant said.

Google did not reveal a security breach on its Google+ social network to avoid reputational damage and regulatory control, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal that cites documents and people informed about the incident.

A "software" flaw gave third-party developers potential access to private profile data for hundreds of thousands of Google+ users between 2015 and March 2018, according to the report reviewed by RT.

Possibly exposed data include user names, email addresses, birth dates, profile photos and genders, although information related to personal communications and telephone numbers was not affected by the breach .