Twitch Hype Chat bug unintentionally causing massive donations

According to streamer and user reports, Twitch’s new Hype Chat feature has a bug that’s caused some unintentionally high donations in some currencies.

For those Twitch viewers who may have missed the news, the streaming platform recently announced a new feature called Hype Chat.

Similar to YouTube Live’s Super Chats, the Hype Chat feature allows users to purchase messages that become pinned to the top of the chat. These messages can be customized fairly extensively and are purchased in each viewer’s respective currency.

Unfortunately, it seems the feature may not be rolling out smoothly for all territories, as some viewers and streamers have reported unintentionally large donations due to a bug surrounding Hype Chats.

Twitch Hype Chat bug accidentally inflating donations

An early report of this bug came from a German streamer named acid_fired, who posted a clip to Twitter after he noticed the glitch in action.

The clip showed the streamer talking to chat and testing out the feature. Despite typing out a donation as 1,21 €, the program instead reads it as 121,00 €, which would end up being a much bigger donation than originally intended.

It appears that Hype Chat is displaying the proper currency punctuation visually, but doesn’t recognize it when making the purchase. Plenty of currencies around the world use a comma instead of a period to differentiate amounts of money, but it seems Hype Chat isn’t correctly picking up on these commas.

Thankfully, members of Twitch’s staff have caught wind of this unfortunate bug and are already working on a fix. The company’s Director of Product Management Matt Long said that it was “obviously a bug” and confirmed a fix is in the works.

At the time of writing, there’s been no official confirmation that the bug has been fixed, so until then, viewers should be very careful when using Hype Chat’s in certain currencies like the euro.