This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com
By Justin Worland, TIME
Images from tens of thousands of Snapchat user accounts, many explicit, were leaked onto the internet late Thursday — but the messaging app said the hack wasn’t its fault.
Snapchat said that third-party applications were responsible for the breach of as many as 200,000 user accounts, and that their own servers were never compromised.
A 13GB database of Snapchat photographs taken over a number of years was leaked to online message boards Thursday. It reportedly includes a large amount of child pornography, from teenage users.
“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,” a statement read. “We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.”
The news comes just weeks after the release of nude photos of more than 100 celebrities in a massive hack of photos stored in Apple’s iCloud.
