A glitch in Twitch's system may have exposed direct messages shared between users, according to the platform.

Twitch is reaching out to users about messages sent with the old “messages” feature that was removed in May. 

Although it has been removed, users had the option of downloading the archive if they wished to. However, it appears that due to a glitch in the system, some private messages may have been exposed.

Affected streamers spoke about their worry and frustration on Twitter, saying that not having any control over the situation was hard. MikeTheBard, for example, said: “one of my messages was from a user to me who won a giveaway. Their full name and address is listed with their username. I wonder how many other people got this?”

Yikes

“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,” A Twitch spokesperson told Polygon.

“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.”

Streamer Meg Kaylee also expressed her concern about it, saying it was “super unnerving, especially considering so many broadcasters used Messages to communicate in regard to giveaways and mailing information.”

I got this too. Super unnerving, especially considering so many broadcasters used Messages to communicate in regard to giveaways and mailing information.

— Meg Kaylee (@Meg_Kaylee) August 17, 2018

Twitch has emailed a number of streamers involved, informing them about the situation but others can also check if they have affected using this portal.