Despite how much it pains me to write a post about Twitter, I think I just caught something within 20 minutes of it occurring and that's just too tempting. So, in the interest of more experimentation with Breaking News:
It looks like people just found a bug to force people to follow them on Twitter. Remember when Conan chose to follow just one person and it was a significant (and funny) story? Well now he's forcibly following around 200 additional people.
But! Less than an hour after major blogs found and published the bug, Twitter seems to have taken action by resetting everyone's followers to zero. The Mashable post on the bug went up at 12:45PM today so the reset happened sometime between then and 12:54 when I noticed it.
Now, I'm sure they'll get everyone's followers list back soon. But I can't help but imagine the headlines if they deleted everything and had to set everyone back to zero.
Update: Twitter says the follow system is temporarily offline and the original bug is fixed. Meanwhile, twitter people lose their shit. Rumors abound of a mysterious, all-powerful Turkish hacker. Lulz ensues.
Update Update: Followers are back, but not reset to before the bug. Conan is still following 283 people. Also, The Toronto Sun has done some good detective work on the bug. Shedding light on the rumor of the legendary Turkish hacker, they found out that the bug was first posted on a Turkish site, then popularized by webrazzi.com. And after a hilarious game of telephone, we have Twitter denizens shaking in their boots at the thought of the Turkish hacker who managed Mission Impossible his way into the Twitter mainframe and steal all their precious followers.
Update Update Update: Conan's deleting his "followees" as I type. Down to 164 now. Kinda funny to watch. (2:30PM)
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