If your Twitter follower/following counts fell to zero earlier today–here’s why:
Original: the site Gizmodo stumbled onto an amazing hole in Twitter that allowed you to have anyone you want following you.
It looks like Twitter has shut this down after word of the hole spread across…Twitter.
Here’s how it worked.
* Log in to Twitter.
* Type “accept ‘username'”
* Hit “Tweet”In “username” put in who you want. We went with Conan O’Brien because he said over the weekend, “If it ever says I’m following more than one person, I’ve been hacked. I’m a completely monogamous Twitterer—I only follow Sarah Killen.”
And Boom! It worked for us. Apparently it also worked for 379 other people! Conan is following 380 people now.
While we were writing this post it seems Twitter closed the hole. As a result of what Twitter is doing, it knocked the number of followers and following to 0 for all users.
You still get the Tweets from people that are following you though.
From the Twitter 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.
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