Since its release in September, 2011, the now world renowned app for sending quick videos and pictures was reported to have been hacked due to a bug exploitation in the application’s coding. On January 1^st, 2014, the website SnapchatDB.com uploaded the phone numbers, user names, and passwords of 4.6 million Snapchat users.

According to an article from the NBC news website, SnapchatDB said, “This database contains username and phone number pairs of a vast majority of the Snapchat users. This information was acquired through the recently patched Snapchat exploit and is being shared with the public to raise awareness on the issue.”

The website was taken down Wednesday morning of the same week, but not before several people have claimed to already have downloaded the database in its entirety.

The creators of SnapchatDB announced a follow-up statement to the shutdown of their website to several tech websites.

“Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech startups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does.”

The Snapchat development team posted on their blog a response to the situation, in attempt to reduce the severity of the exploit.

“Adding a phone number to your Snapchat account is optional, but it’s helpful for allowing your friends to find you,” said the development team of Snapchat. “We don’t display the phone numbers to other users and we don’t support the ability to look up phone numbers based on someone’s username.”

“Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way,” Snapchat said in a statement that they released. “Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.”