After Facebook Now Twitter Disrupted by Bug

The Internet community has not yet gotten over the Facebook bug episode, and we have another bug which has hit Twitter. Call this a sort of coincidence or just pure bad timing, but this really puts a big question on the privacy security of users of these popular social networking websites.

Though the hack bug was rectified by Twitter, it had allowed many users to force anyone they wanted on the website to follow them, without their consent, simply by typing "accept @username". This bug was very quickly passed around and quite a few users forced celebrities to follow them. Besides this, it also wiped out the followers and friends of many users. The flaw could have also allowed spammers to insert messages into thousands of accounts, but Twitter had rectified the loophole before then. Many users' accounts also needed to be reset in this process.

The website had this to say through a status blog post - "We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to force other users to follow them. We're now working to roll back 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."

Twitter allows its users to post messages online which are called Tweets. People can choose to follow whoever they want to, but it's not necessary that the other side has to do the same. The website has grown in popularity over the last couple of years and now boasts of a user base of around 100 million. Facebook is even further up in this regard and has a user base of around 400 million.

With these 2 most popular social networking websites showing signs that they too experience major glitches and can be exploited, though it's rare, users will have to be wary about the stuff they say online, besides the personal information that they enter on their profiles.