Tournament organizer Major League Gaming seems to have had their Twitch channels hacked. The esports broadcasting channel has been banned after streaming explicit content for at least an hour early Saturday morning.
Major League Gaming, or MLG, is a New York-based esports organization known for hosting CSGO, Call of Duty, and Halo tournaments as far back as 2002. MLG was one of the first organizations to put together televised esports events such as the Halo MLG tournaments in 2006 and 2007.
For those who saw the stream in the early hours of the 22nd, it was clear the organization had been hacked. The stream was turned off repeatedly but it just kept coming back online again and again. One Redditor claims that someone on the MLG side even tried to cover the illicit images when simply turning the stream off failed, but the material continued to play until Twitch stepped in and banned the channel more than an hour later.
Twitch has had a problem with channels streaming inappropriate content for some time, but this is the first time a channel with a sizable follower content has been involved. Typically, channels with no following will start streaming this material, the audience will grow over several hours, and eventually, Twitch will discover the channel and permanently ban it. In this case, MLG was obviously not responsible for the stream, so it's unclear if Twitch will reinstate their channel.
MLG's main channel has over 800,000 followers and, while there's no definitive account of how many people saw the stream today, it's safe to assume it reached a fairly large audience. A second MLG channel called MLGBravo was also banned, but it isn't clear at this time if MLGBravo was also streaming adult content or if it was simply comprised in the hack as well.
Twitch has a 0 tolerance policy with nudity and many streamers have had their channels suspended for showing any kind of adult content whatsoever. The content on MLGs channel today was fairly shocking, and it will be interesting to see how Twitch handles this kind of situation.