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Twitter Follow Bug Temporarily Hobbles Site
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2010-05-10
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Mischief-makers had more than a little fun at Twitter's expense today. The discovery of a bug that let users manipulate which accounts followed them led to all sorts of hijinks, and Twitter eventually had to reset everyone's following/followers lists in order to fix the problem and undo all the damage.
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This bug wasn't serious in any other respect; accounts' passwords and protected updates stayed safe. The bug just happened to be simple enough that, from a technical perspective, everyone could take advantage of it.
Twitter users only had to tweet "accept @usernamehere" in order to make any account follow theirs. Within minutes, then, it was possible for people to make contact with all sorts of celebrities and important corporations.
Conan O'Brien, who's said he'll only follow one person, was following something like 400 in no time as a result. Ashton Kutcher, Lady Gaga, and all other sorts of high-profile people became connected to lots more folks, too.
Then Twitter stepped in. Now, the bug has been fixed, and after a brief period of everything reading "zero," following/follower counts are heading back to where they were before the bug was abused. At the time of this writing, Twitter was still working on that last point, though.
About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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