It’s been a bad week for the internet. It seems every morning for the past few days, Australians have been waking up to the news of an outage, or just some really, really bad content from the platforms we use every day. Well today is no better. Overnight it was revealed that Twitch became the latest victim of a pretty nasty breach.
If you haven’t heard about this yet, take a seat. As first reported by VGC, an anonymous hacker has posted a 125GB torrent link containing, well, all of Twitch, including the source code for the Amazon-owned streaming platform and commit history going back to the start. The leak, posted on 4chan, also contains streamers’ incomes since 2019.
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 confirmed the breach on Twitter, where the post was drowned by screenshots upon screenshots of information contained in the breach.
A lot of what has been shared show creator payout reports since late 2019. If you’re interested, they have CriticalRole, xQC and Summit1g as being the biggest earners. But that shouldn’t be the only takeaway here. Folders containing troves of info of its user base and the entire Twitch operation have been breached.
The breach also includes mobile, desktop and console Twitch clients; proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch; every other property that Twitch owns, including IGDB and CurseForge; and, reportedly, an unreleased Steam competitor, codenamed Vapor, from Amazon Game Studios.
This all comes at a bad time for Twitch (not that there’s ever a good time to be breached), with the #DoBetterTwitch/#TwitchDoBetter hashtags at the forefront of efforts by users to demand a better service from the platform, including boycotts to demand action over hate raids.
The original link posted to 4chan on was accompanied by a message that read: “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space” because “their community is a disgusting toxic cesspool”. They also said “Jeff Bezos paid $US970 million (around $1.3 billion) for this, we’re giving it away FOR FREE”. The intention here is pretty clear.
We’ll update you with further information once we know anything more.