01.04.2025 | 16:26
A data leak involving a whopping 2.87 billion Twitter (X) users has surfaced on the infamous Breach Forums. According to a post by a user named ThinkingOne, the leak is the result of a disgruntled X employee who allegedly stole the data during a period of mass layoffs.
[This data leak] doesn’t contain email addresses, but it does hold a goldmine of profile metadata, including:
• Account creation dates.
• User IDs and screen names.
• Profile descriptions and URLs.
• Location and time zone settings.
• Display names (current and from 2021).
• Followers count from both 2021 and 2025.
• Tweet count and timestamps of the last tweet.
• Friends count, listed count, and favorites count.
• Source of the last tweet (such as TweetDeck or X Web App).
• Status settings (like whether the profile is verified or protected).
[...] As of Jan 2025, X (formerly Twitter) had around 335.7 million users, so how is it possible that data from 2.8 billion users has been leaked? One possible explanation is that the dataset includes aggregated or historical data, such as bot accounts that were created and later banned, inactive or deleted accounts that still lingered in historical records, or old data that was merged with newer data, increasing the total number of records.
Additionally, some entries might not even represent real users but could include non-user entities like API accounts, developer bots, deleted or banned profiles that remained logged somewhere, or organization and brand accounts that aren’t tied to individual users.