Coffee Meets Bagel 2023 data-deletion attack
In August 2023, the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel suffered a worldwide outage that locked users out of their accounts & matches for roughly a week.[1] The company later attributed the outage to a destructive cyberattack in which an outside actor deleted company data and files, and said it had notified law enforcement.[1][2] Coffee Meets Bagel restored access on September 3, 2023, after rebuilding its systems from offline backups.[2][1]
Background
[edit | edit source]Coffee Meets Bagel is a dating application that curates matches for its users.[2] The service & its parent company are documented on the Coffee Meets Bagel page.
Outage and attack
[edit | edit source]The app first went offline on August 27, 2023, with all of its 10 million sign-ups seeing an error screen.[3] Coffee Meets Bagel described the disruption as a worldwide outage, and users reported that they could not sign in, coordinate planned dates, or continue communicating with their matches.[1]
The company said an internal investigation found that a threat actor had infiltrated its network. In its statement, Coffee Meets Bagel said the actor "maliciously deleted company data and files" and that it had notified law enforcement.[2][1] BleepingComputer reported that the company had not confirmed whether the attack was ransomware that encrypted data or a deliberate deletion of data.[1]
Coffee Meets Bagel restored access to its site on September 3, 2023. The company said its team spent days rebuilding its systems from offline backups so that users could get back online.[2][1]
Data exposure
[edit | edit source]Coffee Meets Bagel said users' payment information, driver's license, & passport data were not compromised, because those records are processed through third-party vendors.[2] The company had not clarified whether any other personal user data was compromised, and it said its investigation into the full scope of the incident was still ongoing.[2]
User remediation
[edit | edit source]After service returned, Coffee Meets Bagel credited affected accounts. The company extended active chats by seven days & paid subscriptions by 14 days, and it gave subscribers who had been members for the two weeks before the outage 1,000 free beans, the app's in-app currency.[1] Users who had sent a Discover Like or flowers to matches on August 27, 2023 had those items restored, and users who had boosted their profile on the day of the incident were promised an additional profile boost.[1][2]
Prior 2019 data breach
[edit | edit source]The 2023 attack was not Coffee Meets Bagel's first security incident. On February 14, 2019, the company disclosed that an unauthorized party had acquired user data, specifically names & email addresses from before May 2018.[4] The disclosure affected about 6 million users and was reported as part of a larger breach of 620 million accounts across 16 companies.[4] Coffee Meets Bagel said at the time that no financial information or passwords were compromised.[4]
See also
[edit | edit source]References
[edit | edit source]- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Lawrence Abrams (2023-09-05). "Coffee Meets Bagel says recent outage caused by destructive cyberattack". BleepingComputer. Retrieved 2026-08-16.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 "Cyber attack on dating app Coffee Meets Bagel shuts app, disrupts operations". TEISS. 2023-09-08. Retrieved 2026-08-25.
- ↑ "Coffee Meets Bagel Suffers Multi-Day Outage". Global Dating Insights. 2023-08-30. Retrieved 2026-08-25.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Sophie Lewis (2019-02-14). "Dating app Coffee Meets Bagel announces data breach on Valentine's Day". CBS News. Retrieved 2026-08-25.