Twitter was plunged into confusion today after the address books of all its 100million users were wiped clean.
For more than two hours it appeared Twitter had been hacked as users – including a string of celebrities, were told they had no ‘followers’ and were not ‘following’ anyone.
Users could still post messages but had no way of knowing if they would be seen.
Ashton Kutcher led the outcry posting: “twitter is being hacked by some turkish hacker. haha I have 0 followers.”
“Whew! There’s an update from Twitter, ‘missing relationships are being restored.”
His famous wife, Demi Moore, wrote: “The turkish hacker is really doing a number on twitter wow!’
Celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton added: “We will all remember today! The daytwitter exploded.”
Twitter appeared to have been attacked around 5pm and within minutes, millions of Tweets appeared alerting website chiefs to the incident.
Twitter bosses blamed it on a “bug” caused as they tried to close down another loophole on the site.
The confusion was sparked by a Turkish computer expert who posted details of a loophole that allowed users to ‘force’ others to follow them.
Most social networking sites require users to agree to follow each other – or accept each other as friends – but this new bug allowed people to force celebrities, such as Lady Gaga, to follow them simply by typing “accept@ladygaga”. The flaw only worked on the Twitter website.
It means thousands of celebrity users are now following complete strangers – and can be sent direct messages from those users.
Kim Kardashian, wrote: “Someone hacked my twitter account and direct messaged me! They have added over 200 new people! Ughhhhh.”
Perez Hilton, added: “Celebs now have to go in to their Twitter accounts and manually unfollow the hundreds of more that forced follows. TheDayTwitterExploded.”
