FILE: Hackers discovered a breach in Tea, a viral “dating safety” app made by a San Francisco company, on July 25, 2025.
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Tea, an app where women can swap information about men, went viral this week, riding a flood of attention on social media. It soon rocketed to the No. 1 slot in the Apple App Store’s lifestyle category, and then, promptly, the app was hacked.
To sign up for the “dating safety” app, a woman is asked to submit a selfie and photo of her ID card as verification of her gender. About 13,000 of those submitted images, all from before February 2024, were accessed in the hack, Tea spokesperson Taylor Osumi told SFGATE. The hackers got their hands on an additional 59,000 images that were in the app’s posts, comments and direct messages, she said.
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The data, according to Osumi, had been archived “in compliance with law enforcement requirements related to cyberbullying prevention.” She said the company behind Tea, which is headquartered in San Francisco, learned about the hack Friday morning and swiftly launched an investigation to determine its scope and impact.
“Tea has engaged third-party cybersecurity experts and are working around the clock to secure its systems,” Osumi’s statement read. “At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that additional user data was affected.”
404Media, first to report on the breach, found a thread on 4chan alleging that Tea had left thousands of photos of users’ driver’s licenses and selfies available on a publicly accessible database. One person said they had downloaded thousands of the images, and some users posted dozens of photos of women they said they’d pulled from the database, the outlet wrote.
It was a rough end to an otherwise uproariously successful week for the company, which was founded by San Francisco software engineer Sean Cook. Tea bills itself as a way to avoid being catfished, cheated on or otherwise harmed, letting users upload images of men, assign green and red flags to men’s profiles, and set up alerts for men’s names. It falls in the vein of the well-known “Are We Dating The Same Guy?” Facebook groups. One App Store review called it “basically Yelp for exes” — though, crucially, those exes cannot get onto the app themselves.
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As videos about the app went viral on TikTok and elsewhere this week, hundreds of thousands of women stacked up on the app’s waitlist.
That glut of attention, it appears, is providing another tech issue for Tea’s staff. Around midday on Friday, hours after the hack, the company wrote on its Instagram story that the app’s “massive surge in growth” meant would-be users might not be seeing their waitlist time update.
“Over 2 million of you have requested to join our community in just the past few days,” the company wrote. In the comment section of Tea’s latest post, some Instagram users pleaded for access to the app — and others asked questions about the hack.
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Work at a Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
