Women’s dating app Tea discloses data breach, exposing 72,000 user images
Tea, a dating app for women, has suffered a data breach. Hackers were able to access 72,000 user pictures.
On July 25, 2025, Tea identified “unauthorized access” to its systems and immediately launched an investigation into the matter to assess the scope and impact of the incident.
According to the statement that Tea issued on Friday, the attackers managed to access a legacy system, which contained a dataset from prior to February 2024.
This dataset includes 72,000 images, including approximately 13,000 selfies and photo identification submitted by users during account verification, and approximately 59,000 images publicly viewable in the app from posts, comments, and direct messages.
Tea stresses that no email addresses or phone numbers were accessed, and that only users who signed up before February 2024 were affected.
“This information was stored in accordance with law enforcement requirements related to cyber-bullying investigations,” the statement says.
To protect users, Tea has implemented additional security measures and fixed the data issue that caused the unauthorized access. Law enforcement has been notified to support the investigation.
On how the cybersecurity incident happened, Tea had this to say:
“During our early stages of development some legacy content was not migrated into our new fortified system. An unauthorized actor accessed our identifier link where data was stored before February 24, 2024. As we grew our community, we migrated to a more robust and secure solution which has rendered that any new users from February 2024 until now were not connected to the images involved in this incident.”
404 Media reports that 4chan users have discovered the exposed database on Google’s mobile app development platform Firebase and are sharing personal data and selfies.
Tea is a dating app for women where they can anonymously post comments about men they’ve dated. The dating app’s motto is that” women should never have to compromise their safety while dating.”
Tea has become increasingly popular and claims to have over 4 million women in its community.