Twitch leak reveals 81 creators earned over $1 million since August 2019 from streaming payouts

Twitch is the latest major tech company to suffer a massive data breach. The hackers have reportedly obtained the Amazon-owned streaming platform’s source code and other information. It may have also unveiled a list of top-earning creators, revealing that 81 of them collected more than $1 million just from their streaming payout in the last two years.

The leak became public earlier this week after an anonymous user on 4chan posted about it, claiming that they obtained Twitch’s source code, internal tools, a “Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios,” and records of creators’ earnings from 2019 to the present. The last item has been one of the most discussed aspects of the data breach.

A Reddit post shared a Pastebin link that reportedly showed a list of the top 10,000 earning streamers from the platform. While the page has been taken down as of this writing, Twitter page KnowSomething has shared screenshots of the list showing that 81 Twitch creators reportedly earned more than $1 million from August 2019 to October 2021.

KnowSomething emphasized that the leaked Twitch records only show the “gross payouts” that the streamers received from the platform. It means the figures shown do not reflect how much the creators earned from external sponsorship, donations, merchandise, and revenue from other platforms like YouTube.

The top 5 highest-paid Twitch streamers had a considerable lead from the creators included in the top 100 list. In first place is the channel CriticalRole ($9.62 million), followed chronologically by xQcOW ($8.45 million), summit1g ($5.84 million), Tfue ($5.29 million), and NICKMERCS ($5.09 million).

Unlike other major data breaches this year, though, the source of the leak did not sell the information online. The anonymous source also said on 4chan, “[Twitch] community is also a disgusting toxic cesspool, so to foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space, we have completely pwned them.”

Twitch confirmed on Wednesday that “a breach has taken place” but noted that it has yet to determine the extent of the leak. The hackers and Twitch did not mention if user data were involved, and there is no solid proof yet to suggest that email addresses and passwords were compromised. But it would not hurt Twitch users to take precautionary measures by updating their passwords and enabling two-factor authentication.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash