This past Thursday, Snapchat was hacked by a third-party client, resulting in the leak of roughly 200,000 user photos that are now circulating on 4chan. The leak has been dubbed "The Snappening," and it is likely that many of the compromised photos belong to underage users, as 50% of Snapchat's clientele are between the ages of 13 and 17 years old.

According to The Verge, Snapchat has faced security issues before, but never of this caliber. This time, the fault seems to be placed on a third-party app used to catalog snaps that would otherwise be deleted. Usually, users would assume that the snape would only be visible to Snapchat HQ and the third-party app. However, a recent data breach allowed the snaps to circulate through the open web.

As of now, it is still unclear who is responsible for the breach. Many of the leaked photos have been traced back to website called Snapchat Leaked, which suggests that the photos may have been circulating for many months already.

It makes sense that the perpetrator hasn't come out of hiding - the Huffington Post reports that if any of the leaked Snapchat photos were racy, the possession and distribution of the snaps could lead to some serious prison time.

A Snapchat spokeswoman has since explained that the company explicitly tells its users to avoid third-party apps for this very reason. She stated, "We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks... Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users' security...

We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed," conveying that Snapchat itself does not condone the use of such apps and is working to resolve the situation.