Was Twitter hacked? Not exactly.
Earlier today, Twitter engineers reset the profiles of millions of users, sending a tidal wave of panic coursing out to the far corners of the sprawling Twitterverse. So was Twitter hacked? Not exactly.
According to a post on the official Twitter blog, Twitter engineers were merely responding to a bug that allowed one user to force another user to follow them.
"We’re now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place," a Twitter rep said, before Twitter temporarily adjusted millions of accounts to show zero followers and zero followed users.
The bug appears to have been fixed. And all followers/followed settings have been restored.
But for a while on Monday, chaos reigned on Twitter. "Twitter hacked" was a leading phrase on Google Trends, and across Twitter, many prominent users worried that the popular microblogging service had been assailed by mysterious hackers. “We will all remember today! The day Twitter exploded," fretted celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.
Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, told Computerworld that the pitch of the responses to the Twitter bug was to be expected.
"What we really see with social networking is that for any given tool, whether it's Twitter, Facebook or any other site, there is a hard core of very active users who care a lot about any problems, changes, or interruptions," Olds said. "These people are very vocal and opinionated – passionate, in other words."
Twitter and Facebook – two of the most trafficked sites on the web – have experienced their share of service problems in recent years. Last October, for instance, Twitter had problems updating its timeline. And earlier this month, a bug on Facebook apparently allowed users to peruse their friends' private chat messages. Facebook has since patched up the bug.
