The site, owned by Canadian firm Avid Life Media, has been online since 2001 and claims to have about 40 million users, though that figure is almost certainly inflated, considering a former employee's claim that the company paid her to create false female accounts to attract male customers.

After hackers who call themselves the Impact Team released their first big data dump from Ashley Madison and its parent company on Tuesday, journalists and others have been poring over it, exposing reality TV star Josh Duggar as a confirmed customer, as well as several unidentified government workers who accessed their Ashley Madison accounts from government IP addresses.