Twitter is all sorts of wacky today. Earlier Mike Butcher at TC Europe reported on a bug which can be used to force any Twitter user to follow you. Now, everyone’s follower count has been wiped out, at least temporarily.
If you look right now at the TechCrunch Twitter account, for instance, it lists 0 followers and 0 following. That is down from 1.4 million or so earlier this morning. This is true for every account. It appears to be temporary and part of Twitter’s attempt to deal with the first bug mentioned above. Tweets still seem to be going out, so everyone can breathe easy.
I wonder how many followers we will have when the numbers get restored.
Update: Yup, Twitter is aware of this and working on the issue:
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.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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