Social media micro blogging service Twitter has recently experienced a panic among its users due to a bug that many were exploiting in an attempt to gain more followers to their Twitter accounts. During a brief period recently, all followers to certain Twitter accounts disappeared, but these were restored after engineers went after the bug with gusto and destroyed it. The bug required the engineers to reset the followers and following status of the users to 0 for each category in order to fix the service. After the fix, the company was able to roll back the data and have everything back to working order. An unfortunate side effect ended up being the fact that private updates were not made to all accounts of Twitter members. Certain users had been exploiting a loop that allowed them to type in the name of a Twitter member after inputting the word “accept” and then an @ symbol. This gave certain greed oriented members of the service an edge that allowed them to obtain massive numbers of followers which had not agreed to follow their Twitter accounts.
Since Twitter has long touted the importance of online ethics as a key part of its business model, it knew it needed to work fast to right the error, but has not released any concrete numbers of how many accounts were affected by the error. Members of the blogging community pointed out the issue and made it into what is called a trending topic on the site to gain the attention of Twitter engineers.
