Tea, a dating discussion app aimed at helping women create a safe space to share feedback on the men they date, was launched in 2023 and became instantly popular. This is especially the case in the U.S., where the app was able to climb to the top of the Apple App Store ranking. Despite its resonance on social media and being a massive hit, the sudden rise in its user base was overshadowed on July 25th, 2025, when massive data that included photo IDs, selfies, and comments were exposed due to an unsecured legacy storage system. A second breach has been recently revealed that is said to have exposed over 1 million direct private messages of women, turning the app into a privacy nightmare.
Tea app fallout deepens as private chats of 1.1 million women leaked online
Tea, an app designed to help women identify the red flags in the men they date, has ironically ended up harming the very women it was designed to help. It has been merely days since the scandal of the data breach that exposed about 72,000 images was making the rounds. An update about another breach shortly after has left the users and the tech community concerned about the extent of compromised user privacy.
404 Media reported the second data breach, which seems more grave than the previous one, that exposed photo IDs and selfies. The second breach exposed the personal chats and conversations of about 1 million women, undermining the safety and privacy that the app promised to uphold. As per the report, another security lapse was uncovered by an independent researcher who further revealed the extent of the sensitive data leaked, where conversations about infidelity and abortion were accessed.
Tea acknowledged the ongoing issue and the private messages being hacked, but was also quick to assert that the hack was part of the first one and not a separate new breach. The company said:
We have recently learned that some direct messages (DMs) were accessed as part of the initial incident. Out of an abundance of caution, we have taken the affected system offline. At this time, we have found no evidence of access to other parts of our environment.
While Tea insists the messages exposed are part of the original breach and not a separate one, it could be an attempt to downplay it, even though more data was exposed than the company initially admitted. The app has been facing scrutiny from multiple tech outlets, amid the growing security concerns and serious failures in data protection, calling it massive negligence on the company's end.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
