Twitch, the internet’s largest video game streaming platform, has reportedly suffered a massive data breach with more than 125 GB of information appearing online claiming to be from the website.
First appearing as a torrent on 4Chan, the files have not been proven authentic. They are legitimate, however, according to a source who spoke to Video Games Chronicle.
Among these files is believed to be the entire source code of the streaming platform, along with its comment history going back to the beginnings of the site, reports of creator payouts from 2019, clients for Twitch from a range of devices, proprietary SDKs, internal AWS services used by the site, files related to the other properties that are owned by Twitch, an unreleased Steam competitor referred to as Vapor reportedly crafted by Amazon Game Studios, and Twitch’s internal red teaming tools.
While much of this won’t be of concern to most people, according to one of the Twitter users who claim to be sifting through the data, there are also encrypted passwords hidden among the files. The user also recommended that anyone who has a Twitch account enable two-factor authentication to avoid any issues.
One of the most publicized aspects of this supposed leak has been the earnings reports for some of Twitch’s most popular streamers, which appear to show what they earned between August 2019 and October 2021.
The leaker intends to divulge more data in the future and said this massive 125 GB file is just the beginning, according to Video Game Chronicles’ report. But no further information was shared on what’s to come.
Update Oct. 6 10:30am CT: Twitch has confirmed the data breach. “We can confirm a breach has taken place,” Twitch said. “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.”
