Twitch confirms data has been hacked

Twitch, Amazon’s video streaming service, confirmed it was hacked Wednesday, a breach that included details on payments to content creators and yet-to-be-released products from Amazon Game Studios.

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The breach included payments to content creators since 2019 and source code for multiple versions of the Twitch client, Twitch software development kits and code for Amazon Web Services, The Washington Post reported.

“Our teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this,” Twitch wrote on Twitter, confirming the breach.

Information was originally linked on 4chan, an online chat forum, on Tuesday night, the newspaper reported.

The anonymous 4chan user who allegedly posted Twitch data said they did so to hurt the company’s business, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The hacker said they were releasing the information to “foster more disruption and competition” in online video streaming, CNBC reported. The person called the Twitch community a “disgusting toxic cesspool,” according to the website.

The user labeled the data dump as “part one,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

According to the Post, 81 streamers have allegedly received more than $1 million from Twitch since 2019. This appears to be a combination of money made from advertising, subscriptions and other features within the Twitch program, the newspaper reported.

The figures do not take into account other ways streamers make the bulk of their money, such as brand deals, channels on platforms such as YouTube, merchandise and viewer donations.

Twitch’s highest-paid individual streamer, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, is listed as having made $8,454,427.17 since 2019, the Post reported.

A Twitch spokeswoman declined to comment on what data was taken, according to The Wall Street Journal. The hack was earlier reported by videogameschronicle.com.

Amazon bought Twitch, originally known as Justin.tv, in 2014 for about $970 million in cash, the newspaper reported. It currently has an average of more than 2.5 million viewers at any given time. More than 7 million creators stream live video on the platform each month, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing Twitch’s data.

The site is primarily focused on videos and live-streams for video game lovers, CNBC reported.

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