[Also See - REVEALED: How Today’s Twitter Bug Was First Discovered]
Twitter has an embarrassing bug on its hands –- one that allows users to make anyone follow them. Mashable reader Ozan Yılmaz e-mailed us the details this morning, writing “[tweet] accept [username]" then the [username] immediately starts following you.”
We confirmed the issue when we noticed that our main Twitter account is now following lots of new people that we didn’t manually follow on our own. That means that if you choose to exploit this bug, your tweets can show up in anyone's timeline -- at least until the issue gets resolved.
Other reports confirm that this exploit is currently being used by many users. No word yet from Twitter on when this might be fixed and if they’ll be able to do undo the damage, but we’ll update here when we know more.
Below, an image of the 194 people Conan O'Brien now follows. Previously, the comedian was famously only following one person:
Update #1: Many users are also noticing that their following/follower counts have been reset to 0.
Update #2: Twitter says that "follow/unfollow is temporarily offline while we fix a bug."
Update #3: Twitter has provided the following update to its status blog: "We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to “force” other users to follow them. We’re now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place. Follower/following numbers are currently at 0; we’re aware and this too should shortly be resolved."
Update #4: Twitter says that private tweets were not exposed as a result of this bug.