After the events of the last ten days it would be no surprise if the first and only New Year resolution of Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel is to accept the next multi-billion dollar that comes along to buy his company. After spending most of 2013 being celebrated as the start-up internet application that refused to sell to the big players, in 2014 Snapchat has to deal with the backlash of an unpopular content change and a worrying security breach.

Despite the fast moving nature of them, users on the whole prefer to have their social networks look and operate the same way all the time. Even the slightest change on something like Facebook or Twitter usually sees a flood of complaints and protests.

Why exactly, in the face of this, Snapchat decided to fundamentally alter the service they offered – allowing pictures and videos to now be viewed twice, rather than the one off premise the application started off with – remains a mystery. As the “replay” option increased the risk of private pictures being seen by a wider audience than the sender intended, the complaints have been coming in thick and fast since the change was made just before Christmas.

That, however, now seems minor in comparison to the New Year’s Day security breach. Hackers, concerned at both vulnerability in the Snapchat servers and the company’s apparent lack of action, set up a site called ‘Snapchat.db’ and listed some 4.6million user names. To show just how much information could be obtained they also listed the phone numbers of the users, hiding the last two digits of each number.

Reports suggest that Snapchat were made aware of the security issue a week ago but did not respond, bar a web comment saying that “obstacles” had been put in the way of anyone trying to access user details. It seems that this was not good enough for some, as the release of the information seems geared towards showing Snapchat how serious the vulnerability is rather than to cause any malicious damage.

Had Evan Spiegel and his fellow founders agreed to sell for the US$3billion Facebook offered, this would a story they might have read in passing as they wondered what to do with their money. Instead, the owners of Snapchat have the daunting task of restoring the application’s credibility and security ahead of them.