Massive Data Breach At Elon Musk's X Reportedly Exposes Data Of Millions Of Accounts: 'By Far The Largest Social Media Breach Ever'

A substantial data breach has been reported at Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, impacting millions of accounts.

What Happened: The cybersecurity team at SafetyDetectives stumbled upon a post on BreachForums, a hacking message board. The post, made by a user named ThinkingOne, contained a 34 GB CSV file with over 201 million entries of data purportedly from X users.

X did not immediately respond to Benzinga’s request for comment.

ThinkingOne cross-referenced the 2025 leak with a January 2023 X data breach, which contained email addresses of 209 million users. Although the older breach had less metadata, it included private email addresses. As a result, ThinkingOne compiled a file on 201 million active users from the 2025 leak whose emails had already been exposed.

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ThinkingOne stated that the leaked data of nearly 400 GB does not contain sensitive user information. However, it includes metadata like account creation dates, locations, display names, post counts, and other similar details. Coupled with previously leaked email addresses, this information could be exploited by hackers for phishing and social engineering campaigns. SafetyDetectives has confirmed the authenticity of a sample of the leaked data. The exact origin of the breach is yet to be determined.

According to Computing.co.uk, a disgruntled employee is likely to have stolen data from 2.87 billion profiles during mass layoffs following Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition.

Why It Matters:  According to Statista, X has over 400 million users worldwide, hence, the count of 2.87 billion profiles could include historical or experimental records, bot accounts, banned or inactive profiles, merged legacy and modern data, and non-user entities like API accounts.

"This is by far the largest social media breach ever, in terms of 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,” data enthusiast ThinkingOne told Davey Winder,’ veteran cybersecurity analyst at Forbes.

This incident follows a previous report of a “massive cyberattack” on X in early March, which Elon Musk claimed to have originated from Ukraine. Musk, currently leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had revealed that X was under a significant cyberattack.

On Friday, Elon Musk's xAI acquired the social media platform X for $33 billion. “Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk stated

The latest data breach raises concerns over the security measures in place at X and the potential risks to its users. The full impact of this breach remains to be seen, as investigations continue.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.