Twitch is warning users that it may have exposed some of their messages to other users. The livestreaming site has sent out emails today to a number of its broadcasters about a bug that would misfile older messages so that other people could download them and read them.
I reached out to Twitch for a comment, and a company spokesperson says that it has fixed the bug. It also explained that most of the exposed messages were promotional announcements that went out to everyone who subscribes to certain channels. But it’s possible that this also affected private communications featuring more sensitive information as well.
Here’s the full statement from Twitch’s spokesperson.
“In May, we removed a legacy feature called Messages and provided users the ability to download an archive of past messages. Due to a bug in the code that generated the message archive files, which has since been fixed, a small percentage of user messages were included in the wrong archives. The primary use case for Messages was promotion; streamers sending out mass communication to subscribers for example, and the majority of messages that were unintentionally provided to another user fall into that category. We have notified users via email and provided them the affected messages for review. Protecting our users’ privacy is important to us and we have taken actions to ensure this kind of error does not happen in the future.”
Some Twitch streamers are talking about the warning from Twitch on social media. Some note that they only had one misfiled message while others say that they have entire folders of messages that other people could have accessed.
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I had an ENTIRE FOLDER of incorrectly delivered messages. It was all old information to Rocket League/LoL games and my retired Snapchat, so thankfully nothing current, but y'all, double-check if you got that email.
— Elspeth Eastman (@ElspethEastman) August 16, 2018
If this bug affected you, Twitch sent a warning message. Check your email, which will provide instructions on how to see which of your messages were vulnerable.
