Twitter ‘Force Follow’ Bug, Forced Twitter For Resetting Followers/Following Counts To Zero?

Twitter, Come On April’s Fool Has Gone Since Long

Some half and hour back, when I logged in to my twitter account, I was like “woho, why are my Followers/Following counts all 0“. Searching around on their support threads, I saw other users complaining as well, infact there were a whole lot of them.

Why All Twitter Counts Gone Back To 0 – The Force-Follow Twitter Exploit

The reason behind this weird, and perhaps frustrating, behaviour stems from an apparent ‘Force someone to follow you on twitter bug‘. In other words, even if X is not following you, you can use an exploit to make him/her follow you.

Twitter just tweeted that to solve this bug, they had to put offline the Following/Followers count module.

Is that really true, or was it that twitter wanted to hide yet another bug?

How Does The Force-Follow Twitter Exploit Work?

There are two ways (known till now) to force someone to follow you, these are:

• accept [Twitter username] – That is, just tweet in: accept 7php and you would force me to follow you!

• accept @username– That is just tweet accept @7php and bingo, you have me follow you!

Can I Do It Too? Urm, Not Anymore!

Twitter finally claimed that they have just fixed this exploit. I fear you are too late to experiment or play with this (awesome?) bug. 😛

From Twitter:

Follow bug discovered, remedied. 17 minutes ago

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.

Update (10:18 AM PST): Of note: protected updates did not become public as a result of this bug.

The Best Twitter Joke Of The Day Goes To Mike Melanson

Here’s a quote from the post Mike Melanson made:

Have I mentioned how cool I am? This morning alone, Bill Gates, Conan O’Brien and Jesus all started following me on Twitter. Seriously.