Coffee Meets Bagel says recent outage caused by destructive cyberattack

The Coffee Meets Bagel dating platform confirms last week's outage was caused by hackers breaching the company's systems and deleting company data.

The dating platform says they are geared towards users looking for a serious relationship rather than casual dating.

Last week, Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB) suffered a worldwide outage, with users upset that they could not coordinate planned dates or continue communicating with their matches.

Today, CMB confirmed that the outages were caused by their systems being breached and a hacker deleting company data, causing the production servers to no longer operate correctly.

"We determined that the outage was the result of an outside actor who maliciously deleted company data and files," reads an outage FAQ from Coffee Meets Bagel.

"We quickly re-established a secure environment for our technology team to restore our production services and notified law enforcement about this incident."

At this time, Coffee Meets Bagel has not confirmed if the attack was ransomware that encrypted data, effectively making it unusable, or if the threat actors purposely deleted data to bring down the service.

BleepingComputer reached out to CMB with further questions about the attack but did not receive a reply.

The service has been back online since September 3rd, with the company extending chats by seven days and subscriptions by 14 days. For those who were members for two weeks before the outage, CMB is also providing 1,000 free beans to subscribers.

Any users who sent a Discover Like or flowers to matches on August 27th will receive an additional item in their profile. Any user who boosted their profile will also receive an extra boost in their profile when the Boost system comes back online.

CMB is also reassuring users that none of their matches should feel like they were ghosted, as the platform was down for everyone during the outage period.

Coffee Meets Bagel warns that all users must log back into the system as they automatically logged all users out of the system at the time of the attack.

This is not the first time Coffee Meets Bagel has suffered a cyberattack.

In 2019, on Valentine's Day, CMB disclosed a data breach that exposed user's email addresses and names.