Wouldn’t it be upsetting if your private messages or your old archived chats suddenly were exposed to others? Well, Twitch an Amazon-owned streaming platform with over 140 million active users may face this as a reality. A Twitch bug exposed private message archives of some streamers to other users. Twitch has begun notifying affected users about the glitch.
Twitch Bug Exposed Message Archives
After experiencing a troubling situation due to a recent bug, Twitch has sent alerts to streamers regarding the matter. Reportedly, a glitch in Twitch’s archived messaging feature exposed private messages of users to others. Although, the glitch affected a relatively small percentage of messages of Twitch streamers, the subsequent exposure of some private messages could be disconcerting.
As confessed by the officials, the glitch appeared while Twitch removed the message feature. The incident happened on May 5, 2018. After noticing the matter, they began sending alerts to affected users.
As mentioned in their notification,
“On May 5, 2018, Twitch 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 we have since fixed, a small percentage of messages were included in the wrong archives. As a result, some users who downloaded their message bundle may have one or more of your messages in their archive.”
They have also posted a copy of this alert in a tweet from their official Twitter handle.
A bug in Twitch's message archive system accidentally gave access to "a small percentage of messages" to the wrong users.
To see if you were among those effected, check your email or go to https://t.co/JV9FLPkSHc pic.twitter.com/3CQgOXFFZL
— Streamer News (@StreamerNews) August 16, 2018
Did This Twitch Bug Affect Me?
With regards to the bug and the incidental exposure of private messages of Twitch users, Polygon reached out to Twitch to probe for further detail. In response, a Twitch representative stated that the bug has only affected a small percentage of users’ messages that were mainly promotional.
“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.”
Whilst Twitch has notified the affected streamers about the bug, you can still check whether the bug has affected your message archives you can visit https://www.twitch.tv/messages/archive. To see your own message archive, you can visit https://www.twitch.tv/messages/. Twitch has announced that the archives will remain there until November 1, 2018.
