UPDATE: Oct. 6, 2026, 11:55 a.m. This article has been updated to reflect the statment Mashable recieved from a Snowflake representative.

ASOS app users in the UK woke up Tuesday to an unsettling pop-up. As Mashable reported, messages that appear to come from hackers have been showing up inside the official ASOS app. One of them, addressed to the retailer's data protection officer and IT team, claims the senders "have fully compromised the Snowflake instance" and threatens to leak it.

For most people, any app you use that stores your personal information is a bit scary. Beyond that, though, most shoppers probably have no idea what a Snowflake instance even is. So, why should ASOS customers be worried?

Snowflake is a company that sells a cloud-based data platform. Businesses use it to store large amounts of information and run analyses on it. According to Snowflake's documentation, the platform combines data storage, processing, and analytics into a single service, and it handles the hardware, software, and maintenance itself. Customers don't install it on their own servers; instead, it runs on major public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

The data can take many forms. Snowflake's documentation says the platform can hold neatly organized tables with rows and columns, looser formats like JSON files, and unstructured material such as documents, images, and audio. Companies also use it to build data pipelines, train machine learning models, and share data with partners.

So, think of Snowflake as a highly organized warehouse that a company rents.

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