Follower bug hits Twitter

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Twitter temporarily reset all follower numbers to zero yesterday after noticing a bug was allowing users to "force" others to follow them.

Yesterday afternoon, Twitter users may have noticed that they no longer appeared to be following, or followed by, anyone.

In a post on its blog, the social networking site said it temporarily set everyone to zero as it battled a bug which let some users force others to follow them, leading to reports of celebrities suddenly finding themselves following random people.

According to a report in Gizmodo, the flaw was pretty simple to take advantage of, as all users had to do was type "Accept" followed by any Twitter user name to make that person follow them.

The flaw was reportedly discovered by a Turkish tweeter, who was merely showing his love for a band called Accept when he discovered he'd accidentally forced someone to follow him.

Such a vulnerability will raise further concerns about the security of Twitter, after a series of flaws have hit the site.

Twitter stressed that no protected accounts were made public because of the bug and said follower numbers have now been set back to pre-bug levels.

While Twitter said it had fixed the "spurious followings," it didn't seem to confident in the solution, advising users how to ditch follows it hadn't managed to fix. "If you are still seeing folks you are following who you didn’t choose to follow, please use the block or unfollow tools to remedy."

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