Bethesda confirms up to 65 customers may have had personal data leaked

Please note, this article originally stated that "everyone's" customer support tickets were viewable by other customers, which does not appear to be the case. I apologize for the error and have corrected this story.

The hits keep on coming for Bethesda and its customers. For a brief period Wednesday, players who logged into Bethesda's website to view or update their technical support tickets were able to view other customers' support tickets, too. The information in some of these support tickets included customer's names, email addresses, and other personal information.

Support tickets may also include uploaded documents, especially since many Fallout 76 Power Armor Edition buyers have been instructed to upload receipts to claim their replacement bags after that whole Fallout 76 bag debacle last week. Those uploaded documents were viewable by other customers as well, and those receipts most likely contained at least partial credit card information.

The issue has been resolved by Bethesda, who took its support site offline for a period Wednesday, but not before it was reported by users on Reddit, on Twitter, and on Bethesda's forums. Yeesh.

Update 1: Bethesda has acknowledged and apologized for the incident, saying it revealed "a limited number" of tickets, none of which contained complete credit card information or passwords.

Update 2: Bethesda now says its investigation of the issue shows that "fewer than 123" customer support tickets were vulnerable for the period of the website error, which lasted approximately 45 minutes. Of those tickets, Bethesda says "no more than 65" contained personal information. None of these tickets contained user account passwords or complete credit card numbers. However, the exposed data did include customer names, usernames, emails, addresses, and phone numbers if they were included by the customer in their support tickets. Tickets may also have included an image of the customers' proof of purchase, and thus partial credit card information.

Bethesda says it is contacting the affected customers. You can see the statement embedded below.

pic.twitter.com/RhjfVx8fJYDecember 7, 2018

Thanks, PCGamesN.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.