Ashley Madison is a dating website designed specifically for married people to meet and date other married people. Now, you may ask, is this not cheating? The answer is: Yes, it is. The slogan of the website is, quite literally, “Life is short, have an affair”. Thus, if anything is leaked from Ashley Madison’s “secure” data basin, lives and marriages could potentially be ruined. But that cannot happen, right?

Well, it just did. On July 20, a organization called “The Impact Team” stole information from Ashley Madison’s database and threatened to leak it on the internet should the website not be shut down immediately. True to their words, the group released over 60 Gigabytes worth of information on the Internet a month later, on August 20. For reference, that is over 30 million names and emails, which is 30 million marriages potentially ruined.

At first, the information was only available on the Deep Web, which in itself is a terrifying place; a place where you can hire hit men and buy illegal drugs. However, after multiple programmers got wind of the situation, they immediately set to work on creating an easy and accessible search engine where anyone can search up emails to see if it matches up with any of the emails that was leaked. Consequently, countless couples are filing for divorce, spurred on by them discovering about his or her partner’s immoral decision to have an affair.

“At this time, we have been able to secure our sites, and close the unauthorized access points. We are working with law enforcement agencies, which are investigating this criminal act”, says Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison, releasing this statement on Twitter.

Ashley Madison is not without controversy, however. The website contains 29 to 31 million people listed as male, while only 5.5 million are female. However, it is currently unknown if all of the female users are even real, as reports show that as much as 95% of people that list their gender as female just create a profile and then vanish into thin air. These accounts have never checked their messages, never chatted with someone, or never did anything on the site.

Due to this, people are suspecting that Ashley Madison employees are being paid just to make fake female accounts, as real breathing women are sparse in the male-dominated land that is Ashley Madison. These discoveries led to many people accusing the company of fraud, as the millions of men who paid money to Ashley Madison are just paying to talk to someone who is not even real.

This scandal is not over, however. Who knows if more information will be released in the future? Who knows how many more lives could be ruined? And what will be the future of Ashley Madison? Only time will tell.

Poon S