Comic CMOA has been offline since Thursday, and NTT Solmare still cannot say when it comes back. The manga platform confirmed on Friday that its servers were accessed without authorization, and on Sunday it said the cause has been identified and that preventive measures are being put in place with help from outside security specialists.
That is the good news. The rest is a queue of things that have to happen before the app reopens: further safety measures, coordination with the relevant authorities, and a review of what the intruders actually took. The company’s own wording says an exact resumption date is difficult to give.
Member data did leak. Comic CMOA lists email address, date of birth, gender, nickname and hashed passwords among the exposed information. A hashed password is stored as a scrambled string rather than plain text, which slows down anyone trying to recover the original. It does not make a weak or reused password safe. If you had an account and used that password anywhere else, change it there now rather than waiting for the service to come back.
Two things are confirmed as not leaked. Credit card information is not stored in the affected system, according to the company. Purchase history and the contents of the My Bookshelf section have not been confirmed as leaked or damaged so far.
The disclosure also grew over the weekend. Beyond the member fields listed earlier, Comic CMOA says certain system log files were accessed and retrieved. Those logs are now being reviewed to work out whether any member information sits inside them. Affected users will be contacted once that review finishes, and the company has not said how many accounts are involved.
What happened, in order
The timeline went from suspicion to confirmation in about 24 hours. Emergency maintenance was announced Thursday morning. By that evening the company was telling users there was a high likelihood of unauthorized external access. Friday it confirmed the breach. Sunday it had a cause and a plan, and no date.
Comic CMOA is a long-running digital manga storefront in Japan, operated by NTT Solmare. It sells individual chapters and volumes, runs publisher campaigns and free-reading promotions, and carries a deep back catalogue that includes older series with no print availability. For readers outside Japan it has been one of the more accessible routes into that catalogue, which makes a multi-day outage more than an inconvenience.
The pattern here is familiar from other platform breaches: a rushed maintenance notice, then a vague update, then a confirmation, then a slow trickle of detail as the investigation widens. The addition of log files on Sunday is the part that usually extends the story, because logs can contain request data, account identifiers and timestamps that nobody thought of as customer records until someone had to read them.
What the company has not said
What Comic CMOA has not done is give a number. No account count, no notification timeline, no statement on whether payment methods on file were exposed beyond the card data question. Those gaps are normal at this stage and still worth watching, because the difference between a small incident and a large one is usually in the numbers the company releases last.
The service’s own updates have been running through its X account, which is where the resumption date will appear first.
For anyone with an account, the practical steps are the usual ones. Change the password if it is used elsewhere, watch for phishing mail that references Comic CMOA and asks for login details or payment information, and treat any message about a “verification” or “refund” as suspect until the platform itself confirms it is sending one. Breach lists get traded and resold for years, so the risk window outlasts the outage.
Bad month for digital comics apps
Digital comics platforms have had a rough few weeks. Kakao’s Tapas announced it is shutting down on March 31, 2027, and Comic CMOA has now been offline for days with no return date. Readers who built libraries on these apps are learning the same lesson twice in one month: the books are rented, and the shop can close for reasons that have nothing to do with the books.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Comic CMOA’s official X account and Oricon News
Featured image: Anime Dispatch graphic. No official image was available while the service is offline.
