Tea Dating Advice, a popular women’s safety app, said it has suspended direct messaging, after a report said intruders could access the messaging feature.

The move comes after a hack last week exposed tens of thousands of images from the site, including photos users were asked to take of themselves and their identity documents as a condition of signing up.

Following the initial hack late last week, online news outlet 404 Media on Tuesday cited an independent security researcher as saying that it was possible for attackers to access private conversations.

Direct messages

Such conversations typically include sensitive information, such as abortions or infidelity, as well as telephone numbers.

In posts to social media, Tea said it was disabling the messaging system after discovering that some direct messages may have been accessed as part of last week’s incident.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we have taken the affected system offline,” the company said.

“At this time, we have found no evidence of access to other parts of our environment.”

Tea, which has some 4.6 million members, allows women to join an anonymous forum to trade information about the men they are dating or considering dating.

They can also use tools to look up information on prospective dating partners.

Tea tells users the photos of themselves that they submit for verification are immediately deleted, but the images had not been deleted and were still included in the database that was hacked, Tea said.

About 13,000 selfies and images of identification documents were included in the hack.

Tea said in its statement that the data was stored “in compliance with law enforcement requirements related to cyberbullying prevention” and was not moved to newer systems that it said were better protected.

It said some 72,000 images had been accessed by hackers.

Personal data

Images from posts, comments and direct messages were also included in the breach, Tea said.

According to the app’s website, founder Sean Cook launched it after witnessing his mother’s “terrifying” dating experiences.

Tea surged to popularity late last week after becoming the subject of heated debate on social media, with some claiming it promoted invasion of privacy and calling for it to be hacked.

On Thursday Tea said on Instagram that it had seen a massive surge in growth, with more than two million users seeking to join in the past few days.

It rose to the top of Apple’s free iPhone app charts and was highly ranked on Google’s Play store.