Many of the photo-sharing software’s users are teenagers, raising fears the so-called Snappening may affect children

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Explicit images sent via Snapchat have reportedly been leaked from a third-party app in an event being dubbed the “Snappening”.

Some 200,000 users of the app, many of whom are teenagers, have allegedly had their photos gathered by the third party over a number of years before the pictures were posted on a website.

The nickname “Snappening” is a nod to last month’s “Fappening”, in which nude pictures were stolen from the iCloud accounts of celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Rihanna, Rita Ora and Kim Kardashian and posted online.

Snapchat allows users to share videos and images that disappear 10 seconds after being received, but it is possible to save the pictures by taking a screen grab in that time.

No images have been published and there is speculation that the leak could be a hoax but some reports said the leaked images were stored on the servers of a website called Snapsaved, where Snapchat users could save their screen grabs rather than keeping them on their device.

Snapchat said it was not the source of the leak and prohibited the use of third-party apps, which are created by separate developers as add-ons.

A spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were allegedly victimised 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.”

The Snapchat app came under fire earlier this year after hackers published user names and phone numbers on a website.

Police and children’s charities have previously warned teenagers of the dangers of using the app to send explicit images.

Half of Snapchat’s 4.6 million users were between 13 and 17 and there is concern that many of the leaked images may be of children.