Twitch Confirms Massive Data Breach

Twitch on Wednesday confirmed via Twitter that the company has suffered a major data breach.

“We can confirm a breach has taken place,” the company wrote. “Our teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this. We will update the community as soon as additional information is available.”

We can confirm a breach has taken place. Our teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this. We will update the community as soon as additional information is available. Thank you for bearing with us.

— Twitch (@Twitch) October 6, 2021

Twitch released its statement after an anonymous hacker reportedly shared more than 120 gigabytes of the company’s data on an online forum called 4chan. The data included the source code for Twitch’s streaming service, details on how much the platform’s top creators get paid and an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios.

Additionally, the torrent was labeled “part one,” hinting that the anonymous user might have more information to leak. Aside from details of creators’ payouts, the initial leak does not include private information like the passwords, email accounts or addresses of the platform’s users.

Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million USD, is a leading game streaming platform, hosting millions of streamers and tens of millions of users.

“What happened to Twitch can happen to almost any organization, though their particular service niche likely made them a higher priority target for some groups,” Bob Rudis, cybersecurity firm Rapid7’s chief data scientist, told CNN.

Elsewhere, Snapchat has introduced a new creator monetization program.