Biggest social media data breach? Report claims 200 million X users’ data dumped on hacking forum

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In what could emerge as the largest social media data breach ever, a self-proclaimed hacker claims to have made public a database containing details of some 200 million X (formerly Twitter) users on a hacking forum.

The alleged breach was first reported by Safetydetective.com after its cybersecurity researchers discovered a post on the hacking forum “BreachForums” from a user named ThinkingOne.

According to the report, the post contained a 34GB downloadable file, which included over 200 million data entries related to X users. ThinkingOne claimed to have decided to give the data away for free, having tried to contact X but with no response.

ThinkingOne claims to “only have included records of X users present in both datasets.” The result is a 34 GB CSV file containing 201,186,753 data entries in total, mentions the report by Safetydetective.com

The report also claims that the data in the file was genuine as they verified it by matching the information with their original X IDs.

According to the report, the alleged compromised data contained information such as X screen names and user IDs, full names, locations, email addresses, follower counts, profile data, time zones, profile images, and more.

Forbes quoted ThinkingOne saying that they were not hackers but ‘data enthusiasts” who don’t indulge in illegal acts and “ensure everything they do is legal”.

“This is by far the largest social media breach ever, in terms of a number of users, and there is at least a possibility that the person responsible for the breach has other data, including emails, phone numbers and passwords,” Forbes quoted ThinkingOne as saying.

While it remains unestablished exactly when the data breach happened, ThinkingOne claims to have accessed the leaked data in January 2022, which was combined with data from another breach in January 2025.

This news arrives only a few days after xAI purchased X for $33 billion. Elon Musk appeared quite excited, stating that "the futures of xAI and X are closely connected." This acquisition presents significant opportunities for Grok, as xAI could utilize X's extensive database to train Grok, potentially challenging OpenAI's new ChatGPT-4o image generator tool.