While I was asleep, apparently the site was hacked. Luckily, (big) part of the lemmy.world team is in US, and some early birds in EU also helped mitigate this.
As I am told, this was the issue:
There is an vulnerability which was exploited
Several people had their JWT cookies leaked, including at least one admin
Attackers started changing site settings and posting fake announcements etc
Our mitigations:
We removed the vulnerability
Deleted all comments and private messages that contained the exploit
Rotated JWT secret which invalidated all existing cookies
The vulnerability will be fixed by the Lemmy devs.
Many thanks for all that helped, and sorry for any inconvenience caused!
Update
While we believe the admins accounts were what they were after, it could be that other users accounts were compromised. Your cookie could have been 'stolen' and the hacker could have had access to your account, creating posts and comments under your name, and accessing/changing your settings (which shows your e-mail).
For this, you would have had to be using lemmy.world at that time, and load a page that had the vulnerability in it.
On Liftoff, I had to clear cache and storage in order to log back in. Still having issues with the website on Chrome, which keeps telling me I'm not logged in after clearing cache and logging back in.
Liftoff hasn't acknowledged me as logged in when voting or commenting for the last day, despite showing it on my user tab. I'm assuming that's related to the recent hack, but I've tried clearing the cash, logging in and out, and restarting the app with no success.