According to a report, a massive X profile data leak has surfaced on Breach Forums, exposing the details of 2.87 billion users.
The story by Hackread states that – according to a post by a user on the Breach Forums named ThinkingOne, the leak is the result of a disgruntled X employee who allegedly stole the data during a period of mass layoffs. No official response from the company as of yet.
The original post by ThinkingOne states that the data, around 400GB worth, was likely exfiltrated during messy layoffs at X. The poster claims that they tried contacting X through multiple methods but received no response.
Frustrated with the lack of acknowledgment from X and the general public, they took matters into their own hands and decided to merge the newly leaked data with another infamous breach from January 2023.
That breach affected around 209 million users, exposing email addresses, display names and usernames (handles), followers count and account creation dates.
While the reported 2025 X profile data leak doesn’t contain email addresses, it does contain several other types of metadata.
However, as the article notes, there’s a problem with the reported number of 2.87 billion users: 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? The article suggests that it could be because 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.
With the total being eight times the reported number of current users, it seems like a reach to me, and it’s possibly why the story hasn’t gained any traction beyond the Hackread article. We’ll see if that changes.
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So, what do you think? Do you think it’s possible that the reported 2025 X profile data leak could affect 2.87 billion users? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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