16 ms·

Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

155 points by yigit 16y ago

aditya 16y ago
Whatever it was, got removed or keeled over...
- yigit 16y ago
  i thought tumblr removed the post, but it seems like it is working now.
chegra 16y ago
Sweet works for me. Check my followers: http://twitter.com/chegra http://twitter.com/chegra
- chegra 16y ago
  Game is over, I have zero followers now.
lukejduncan 16y ago
mirror?
- yigit 16y ago
  http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/05/10/does-this-twitter-bug-force-anyone-to-follow-you/ http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/05/10/does-this-twitter-bug-fo...
maxklein 16y ago
Wow, this works. SnoopDogg is now following me: http://twitter.com/snoopdogg http://twitter.com/snoopdogg. I'm the cartoon figure.
- notauser 16y ago
  Bad plan to try this out with an account you value - if they can identify who has used the exploit they will probably ban you when the dust settles.
  - maxklein 16y ago
    Is it an exploit or is it a valid command? I don't think we hacked anything, we just typed in some text that causes people to follow us, for all we know that's a new feature of twitter.
    - doki_pen 16y ago
      Unfortunately, they can probably do whatever they want with this, whether people think it's fair or not.
    - rmc 16y ago
      No matter what twitter planned for it, it's an exploit. Users think that only they can control who follows them, but this feature gets around that.
    - FlorinAndrei 16y ago
      Sounds like a backdoor that someone forgot, or was too lazy to remove.
  - brk 16y ago
    I highly doubt that. From what I'm reading on the Intarwebs, a LOT of people just couldn't resist playing with this exploit. If they truly banned everyone who did a force-follow with this hack I think they would lose a ton of people who are frankly only getting marginal value from Twitter. I know that if I actually had to rebuild my followee list for "testing" this little hack out I would probably decide it wasn't worth the effort to start over again on Twitter.
jgrahamc 16y ago
Yes, this does work. Now what's the opposite verb to make someone unfollow me?
- remi 16y ago
  "block" :P
lpgauth 16y ago
If you tweet “accept [Twitter Username]”, the other user will automaticly follow you. eg. "accept snoopdog"
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
yigit 16y ago
the user who found this says he was trying to tweet "accept pwnz" where accept is a music group name.
- julio_the_squid 16y ago
  Yeah! BALLS TO THE WALL! This is such an odd bug. I guess it goes to show that nobody knows what strange code which should have been removed four years ago lurks in the heart of Twitter.
nutmeg 16y ago
There could be notoriety for anyone who does this to Conan O'brien. He only follows one person AFAIK. Edit: Looks like this probably already happened.
- dmn001 16y ago
  ConanOBrien was following 190 a few seconds ago, now there are 266 and its rising.
  - barnaby 16y ago
    Now he's at 0 along with everyone else
- benatkin 16y ago
  It sure does! http://search.twitter.com/search?q=accept+conanobrien http://search.twitter.com/search?q=accept+conanobrien
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ErrantX 16y ago
That's an utterly insane bug! Some kind of debug accidentally left in? Or an admin phrase not authorised properly?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Laziness and security by obscurity.
maxklein 16y ago
I wonder if they are going to be able to undo this. Do they have a two sided log of the follow process? If it's just one-sided, they may be able to fix the bug but not to reverse the damage.
- petercooper 16y ago
  I suspect the Summize technology is better than they let on, and they can just do a search for tweets starting with "accept." I doubt there are many legit ones like that.
tibbon 16y ago
Wondering if there will be repercussions for people using this, or if they are able to track it? They aren't able to keep a lot of logs due to the volume.
- sjwalter 16y ago
  They are at least able to tell if you've used it--my account just lost all its followers. http://twitter.com/sjwalter http://twitter.com/sjwalter I'd had a legitimate 30ish followers, used this bug a few times, now 0.
  - johns 16y ago
    I think everyone is at 0. I didn't use the bug and I'm at 0/0
    - barnaby 16y ago
      confirmed, everyone is at 0
- noodle 16y ago
  well, i can tell you right now that my followed and following lists were both just now wiped out, and using the accept bug now produces an internal server error. edit: seems everyone is at 0/0, but the bug still produces an error for me.
- bitsoffreedom 16y ago
  Well, I just tweeted "accept failure" :-)
- simonw 16y ago
  My understanding is that they log pretty much everything using Scribe and run analysis using Hadoop and Pig (based on a talk by Kevin Weil and NoSQL EU the other week) http://www.slideshare.net/kevinweil/nosql-at-twitter-nosql-eu-2010 http://www.slideshare.net/kevinweil/nosql-at-twitter-nosql-e...
- 146 16y ago
jeiting 16y ago
Wow, tested and verified. Somebody is working late tonight.
maxklein 16y ago
Okay, all followers of everyone just dropped to 0...
- maxklein 16y ago
  And the command now gives "internal server error"
TrevorBramble 16y ago
Interesting. My "following" and "followers" counts just dropped to 0.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
sjwalter 16y ago
Heh, I used this a bunch of times. It did work just fine, I had all sorts of people following me who really shouldn't care about me. And now I have 0 followers.
- chegra 16y ago
  I went crazy and start adding the top 200 twitter accounts: http://twitaholic.com/top100/followers/ http://twitaholic.com/top100/followers/ Thought I could sell it afterwards or something. lol
  - HowardRoark 16y ago
    I only added top people on my niche!
dmn001 16y ago
Is it broken now? Both followers and follow count is 0 now?!
galactus 16y ago
amazing. They found out, it seems: right now everyone seems to have 0 following and 0 followers.
- HowardRoark 16y ago
  Thank god. Its everyone.
  - barnaby 16y ago
    I had the exact same feeling of panic, then relief to find out I'm not alone.
  - mrtron 16y ago
    Were you drawing outside the lines again? (horrible ayn rand joke)
- icey 16y ago
  I'm really looking forward to seeing how they handle this.
  - apphacker 16y ago
    Probably just rollback to a previous snapshot?
CoryMathews 16y ago
Wow they fixed that really fast.
fijter 16y ago
Twitter damage control: TRUNCATE followers;
mtinkerhess 16y ago
It appears that they just wiped everyone's list of followers? My feed still works though.
jeiting 16y ago
Now I am getting a 502 when I try to post accept messages.
mrduncan 16y ago
They appear to be working on some sort of fix right now. If you look at "following" lists, everything is showing up as zero for me right now, as in it shows that I'm not following anyone. All other users that I check are also showing that they aren't following anyone.
orblivion 16y ago
This is up there with putting everybody in a root terminal by default on their Androids.
lukeqsee 16y ago
Everyone shows 0 followers, but your stream still shows those you follow. Interesting.
acangiano 16y ago
EDIT: My original message invited people not to try this. It turns out that everyone's counter is showing zero followers, regardless of whether you tried the hack or not. Thanks Travis for pointing this out. I was misled by my desktop client which cached my follower number.
- travisp 16y ago
  even if you don't try it, you'll lose all of your followers
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- rmc 16y ago
  Every's followers count shows zero now, it's not a consequence of doing this
rmorrison 16y ago
I can't believe they didn't create an OOB mechanism for accept/deny requests, especially since they send so much meta data w/ each tweet anyway. This seems like an extremely basic design flaw.
savrajsingh 16y ago
I would guess this exploit has always been possible until today? What's interesting is that someone has probably been wielding this secret power well before it got outed here on hacker news.
- rmorrison 16y ago
  Or, is there anybody whose career took off due to this bug? For example, a musician who got signed primarily because all of the top 50 music producers were following him on twitter.
  - HowardRoark 16y ago
    I have written a script to follow 1000 users on my niche every day. I find that around 15% of users follow me back. In the next couple of days, I remove the rest 85%. I have been doing this for a few months now and I have a few thousand followers on a few twitter accounts. I have set up websites for each of those niches and get decent amount of traffic though twitter. Been banned the first few times, but I have found my ways around it (mostly).
    - drp 16y ago
      Please stop doing that. It's bad for the world.
      - akadruid 16y ago
        Please stop caring. Its bad for your blood pressure. Seriously, it's only Twitter. Conflict, famine, and poverty are bad for the world, but Twitter doesn't matter.
        apphacker 16y ago
        I disagree with the "it's only Twitter" because Twitter is becoming increasingly important to me, but yeah, not worth getting angry about. At least that's what I tell myself.
ilike 16y ago
Official: http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discovered-remedied http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discover...
- cake 16y ago
  Less than an hour to fix it, without any major data loss or collateral damages that I can see. That's pretty good !
- axod 16y ago
  Doesn't seem like a bug to me, it looks like a poor design choice. How many other "special" tweet commands are there? edit: anyone downmodding care to suggest how putting "accept[username]" in a tweet would be considered a 'bug'?
  - chc 16y ago
    It's not that writing "accept [username]" is a bug — the bug is that you can use it to accept people who haven't asked to follow you. Similarly, OK buttons in dialogs are not a bug, but it would be a bug if they all had the same effect as the OK button in the dialog "Are you sure you want to erase your boot drive?"
    - axod 16y ago
      I still don't understand what you're saying. It's obviously not a bug. It's a hidden feature. An easter egg. A floor in their design. They didn't "accidentally" make a special command in tweets that can cause others to follow you. They specifically intended for it to be that way. Suggesting it's a "bug" is silly. Suggesting they "fixed the bug" is misleading.
      - senko 16y ago
        Except if in fact it's an artifact of their SMS interface, which somehow got exposed, or was forgotten and not removed when needed. In which case I'd consider it a bug, not an bad but intentional decision.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
better question: does it produce a full follow ie- if i did this bug, would billgates actually see me in his stream? OR does it just increase the follower count+i show up on his sidebar. if its the former, then wow. I know they're clearing it out now, but somebody must have been using this for a while.
- fname 16y ago
  Yes.
- mortenjorck 16y ago
  I tried it between my main account and a disused one and tweets from the attacking account showed up both through the web interface and through the API.
obsaysditto 16y ago
Its coincidental that Conan tweeted this message a couple days ago: "If it ever says I’m following more than one person, I’ve been hacked. I’m a completely monogamous Twitterer—I only follow Sarah Killen." http://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/status/13631062967 http://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/status/13631062967
- zach 16y ago
  Wow, Conan's Twitter account is not only a test, he's got a user story (that just turned red): In order to provoke curiosity and amusement As a celebrity comedy writer and television host I want to only be shown as following one otherwise-unknown person in Michigan
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- symesc 16y ago
  In the past couple minutes I watched Conan's page while his "following" list went from about 11 to 2 and then back to just Sarah. Page refreshes were very slow. The elves are busy.
whakojacko 16y ago
Even without this bug, I dont think they should still allow commands via tweet at all. It made sense when most tweets were via SMS, but not anymore...Maybe for emerging markets with heavy SMS usage, add a 2nd number to send commands to isolate the two?
- julio_the_squid 16y ago
  Follow and Block make sense as commands you can send through a message. But Accept? Why would you ever be able to control an action on someone else's account? It's rather odd that this exists at all.
  - duskwuff 16y ago
    If you've got your tweets protected (private), you have to accept users to allow them to follow you.
    - julio_the_squid 16y ago
      I think you've missed the point here. This isn't a command that tells your account to accept follow request, or adds someone to your following list - this is a command that instantly makes other people 'accept' a follow request from YOU. This works completely differently in how it would consider the username parameter, and in that the change is applied to the other person's account, not yours.
thedjpetersen 16y ago
Jason Calacanis dream come true :P
yigit 16y ago
here is the official twitter status blog: http://status.twitter.com/ http://status.twitter.com/
shrikant 16y ago
Link doesn't work - does a server hammering lead to a 404? I didn't know it could...
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
BBC has a report on this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10106166.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10106166.stm
djb_hackernews 16y ago
watch everyone play! http://search.twitter.com/search?q=accept http://search.twitter.com/search?q=accept
bena 16y ago
I don't think they've actually wiped out your followers and people you follow. I think they just prevented us from accessing those tables because I'm still getting tweets from people I follow, I just can't see the lists.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
Allegedly fixed, twitter is working on rolling back abuses of the hack. http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discovered-remedied http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discover...
- tlrobinson 16y ago
  Fortunately for Twitter it's incredible easy to track (/^accept \w+$/)
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    Not quite. accept <username> is a perfectly valid command, but it is designed to allow someone requesting to follow you to follow you. Twitter needed to find accept requests which did not have matching follow requests, which is a bit more effort (but not much, I'd imagine). As of now the problem appears to be fixed for a lot of people already.
goldham 16y ago
I would not want to be in the Twitter offices today. Good day to call in sick.
techsansar 16y ago
doesnot work..its already fixed~
blizkreeg 16y ago
Oooo approaching 2012 ;) Louisiana oil spill. Massive Twitter bug. Sticky finger Dow collapse. Facebook losing it's privacy mojo. And to top it off, one line of code I checked in late last night prevented 200 new users from signing up on my freshly minted site.
olh 16y ago
Seems that the fix is just a filter. Is anyone else trying to bypass with html ascii? A few minutes ago, a prompt with the html ascii returned a +0x36 on every char. Now it does not give feedback. "accept BillGates": &#61 ;&#63 ;&#63 ;&#65 ;&#70 ;&#74 ;&#20 ;&#42 ;&#69 ;&#6C ;&#6C ;&#47 ;&#61 ;&#74 ;&#65 ;&#73 ; Maybe they already really fixed this bug (I hope).
gokhan 16y ago
The Turkish user who found the bug explains it here (in Turkish): http://inci.sozlukspot.com/e/4266098/ http://inci.sozlukspot.com/e/4266098/ And people wondering why Axl Rose is following him here :) http://www.mygnrforum.com/index.php?showtopic=164026&st=0 http://www.mygnrforum.com/index.php?showtopic=164026&st=...
tszming 16y ago
Update (6:30 PM PST): We’ve finished our cleanup of the spurious followings generated a result of this bug. 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. Obviously, their so called "cleanup" is incomplete, at least for me :)
araneae 16y ago
Exploit is fixed, and follower lists are rolled back, but they didn't do a perfect job... Felicia Day is still following me. ^-^

155 points by yigit 16y ago

aditya 16y ago

Whatever it was, got removed or keeled over...

yigit 16y ago
i thought tumblr removed the post, but it seems like it is working now.

chegra 16y ago

Sweet works for me. Check my followers: http://twitter.com/chegra http://twitter.com/chegra

chegra 16y ago
Game is over, I have zero followers now.

lukejduncan 16y ago

mirror?

yigit 16y ago
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/05/10/does-this-twitter-bug-force-anyone-to-follow-you/ http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/05/10/does-this-twitter-bug-fo...

maxklein 16y ago

Wow, this works. SnoopDogg is now following me: http://twitter.com/snoopdogg http://twitter.com/snoopdogg. I'm the cartoon figure.

notauser 16y ago
Bad plan to try this out with an account you value - if they can identify who has used the exploit they will probably ban you when the dust settles.
- maxklein 16y ago
  Is it an exploit or is it a valid command? I don't think we hacked anything, we just typed in some text that causes people to follow us, for all we know that's a new feature of twitter.
  - doki_pen 16y ago
    Unfortunately, they can probably do whatever they want with this, whether people think it's fair or not.
  - rmc 16y ago
    No matter what twitter planned for it, it's an exploit. Users think that only they can control who follows them, but this feature gets around that.
  - FlorinAndrei 16y ago
    Sounds like a backdoor that someone forgot, or was too lazy to remove.
- brk 16y ago
  I highly doubt that. From what I'm reading on the Intarwebs, a LOT of people just couldn't resist playing with this exploit. If they truly banned everyone who did a force-follow with this hack I think they would lose a ton of people who are frankly only getting marginal value from Twitter. I know that if I actually had to rebuild my followee list for "testing" this little hack out I would probably decide it wasn't worth the effort to start over again on Twitter.

jgrahamc 16y ago

Yes, this does work. Now what's the opposite verb to make someone unfollow me?

remi 16y ago
"block" :P

lpgauth 16y ago

If you tweet “accept [Twitter Username]”, the other user will automaticly follow you. eg. "accept snoopdog"

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

yigit 16y ago

the user who found this says he was trying to tweet "accept pwnz" where accept is a music group name.

julio_the_squid 16y ago
Yeah! BALLS TO THE WALL! This is such an odd bug. I guess it goes to show that nobody knows what strange code which should have been removed four years ago lurks in the heart of Twitter.

nutmeg 16y ago

There could be notoriety for anyone who does this to Conan O'brien. He only follows one person AFAIK. Edit: Looks like this probably already happened.

dmn001 16y ago
ConanOBrien was following 190 a few seconds ago, now there are 266 and its rising.
- barnaby 16y ago
  Now he's at 0 along with everyone else
benatkin 16y ago
It sure does! http://search.twitter.com/search?q=accept+conanobrien http://search.twitter.com/search?q=accept+conanobrien

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ErrantX 16y ago

That's an utterly insane bug! Some kind of debug accidentally left in? Or an admin phrase not authorised properly?

jacquesm 16y ago
Laziness and security by obscurity.

maxklein 16y ago

I wonder if they are going to be able to undo this. Do they have a two sided log of the follow process? If it's just one-sided, they may be able to fix the bug but not to reverse the damage.

petercooper 16y ago
I suspect the Summize technology is better than they let on, and they can just do a search for tweets starting with "accept." I doubt there are many legit ones like that.

tibbon 16y ago

Wondering if there will be repercussions for people using this, or if they are able to track it? They aren't able to keep a lot of logs due to the volume.

sjwalter 16y ago
They are at least able to tell if you've used it--my account just lost all its followers. http://twitter.com/sjwalter http://twitter.com/sjwalter I'd had a legitimate 30ish followers, used this bug a few times, now 0.
- johns 16y ago
  I think everyone is at 0. I didn't use the bug and I'm at 0/0
  - barnaby 16y ago
    confirmed, everyone is at 0
noodle 16y ago
well, i can tell you right now that my followed and following lists were both just now wiped out, and using the accept bug now produces an internal server error. edit: seems everyone is at 0/0, but the bug still produces an error for me.
bitsoffreedom 16y ago
Well, I just tweeted "accept failure" :-)
simonw 16y ago
My understanding is that they log pretty much everything using Scribe and run analysis using Hadoop and Pig (based on a talk by Kevin Weil and NoSQL EU the other week) http://www.slideshare.net/kevinweil/nosql-at-twitter-nosql-eu-2010 http://www.slideshare.net/kevinweil/nosql-at-twitter-nosql-e...
146 16y ago

jeiting 16y ago

Wow, tested and verified. Somebody is working late tonight.

maxklein 16y ago

Okay, all followers of everyone just dropped to 0...

maxklein 16y ago
And the command now gives "internal server error"

TrevorBramble 16y ago

Interesting. My "following" and "followers" counts just dropped to 0.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

sjwalter 16y ago

Heh, I used this a bunch of times. It did work just fine, I had all sorts of people following me who really shouldn't care about me. And now I have 0 followers.

chegra 16y ago
I went crazy and start adding the top 200 twitter accounts: http://twitaholic.com/top100/followers/ http://twitaholic.com/top100/followers/ Thought I could sell it afterwards or something. lol
- HowardRoark 16y ago
  I only added top people on my niche!

dmn001 16y ago

Is it broken now? Both followers and follow count is 0 now?!

galactus 16y ago

amazing. They found out, it seems: right now everyone seems to have 0 following and 0 followers.

HowardRoark 16y ago
Thank god. Its everyone.
- barnaby 16y ago
  I had the exact same feeling of panic, then relief to find out I'm not alone.
- mrtron 16y ago
  Were you drawing outside the lines again? (horrible ayn rand joke)
icey 16y ago
I'm really looking forward to seeing how they handle this.
- apphacker 16y ago
  Probably just rollback to a previous snapshot?

CoryMathews 16y ago

Wow they fixed that really fast.

fijter 16y ago

Twitter damage control: TRUNCATE followers;

mtinkerhess 16y ago

It appears that they just wiped everyone's list of followers? My feed still works though.

jeiting 16y ago

Now I am getting a 502 when I try to post accept messages.

mrduncan 16y ago

They appear to be working on some sort of fix right now. If you look at "following" lists, everything is showing up as zero for me right now, as in it shows that I'm not following anyone. All other users that I check are also showing that they aren't following anyone.

orblivion 16y ago

This is up there with putting everybody in a root terminal by default on their Androids.

lukeqsee 16y ago

Everyone shows 0 followers, but your stream still shows those you follow. Interesting.

acangiano 16y ago

EDIT: My original message invited people not to try this. It turns out that everyone's counter is showing zero followers, regardless of whether you tried the hack or not. Thanks Travis for pointing this out. I was misled by my desktop client which cached my follower number.

travisp 16y ago
even if you don't try it, you'll lose all of your followers
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
rmc 16y ago
Every's followers count shows zero now, it's not a consequence of doing this

rmorrison 16y ago

I can't believe they didn't create an OOB mechanism for accept/deny requests, especially since they send so much meta data w/ each tweet anyway. This seems like an extremely basic design flaw.

savrajsingh 16y ago

I would guess this exploit has always been possible until today? What's interesting is that someone has probably been wielding this secret power well before it got outed here on hacker news.

rmorrison 16y ago
Or, is there anybody whose career took off due to this bug? For example, a musician who got signed primarily because all of the top 50 music producers were following him on twitter.
- HowardRoark 16y ago
  I have written a script to follow 1000 users on my niche every day. I find that around 15% of users follow me back. In the next couple of days, I remove the rest 85%. I have been doing this for a few months now and I have a few thousand followers on a few twitter accounts. I have set up websites for each of those niches and get decent amount of traffic though twitter. Been banned the first few times, but I have found my ways around it (mostly).
  - drp 16y ago
    Please stop doing that. It's bad for the world.
    - akadruid 16y ago
      Please stop caring. Its bad for your blood pressure. Seriously, it's only Twitter. Conflict, famine, and poverty are bad for the world, but Twitter doesn't matter.
      - apphacker 16y ago
        I disagree with the "it's only Twitter" because Twitter is becoming increasingly important to me, but yeah, not worth getting angry about. At least that's what I tell myself.

ilike 16y ago

Official: http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discovered-remedied http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discover...

cake 16y ago
Less than an hour to fix it, without any major data loss or collateral damages that I can see. That's pretty good !
axod 16y ago
Doesn't seem like a bug to me, it looks like a poor design choice. How many other "special" tweet commands are there? edit: anyone downmodding care to suggest how putting "accept[username]" in a tweet would be considered a 'bug'?
- chc 16y ago
  It's not that writing "accept [username]" is a bug — the bug is that you can use it to accept people who haven't asked to follow you. Similarly, OK buttons in dialogs are not a bug, but it would be a bug if they all had the same effect as the OK button in the dialog "Are you sure you want to erase your boot drive?"
  - axod 16y ago
    I still don't understand what you're saying. It's obviously not a bug. It's a hidden feature. An easter egg. A floor in their design. They didn't "accidentally" make a special command in tweets that can cause others to follow you. They specifically intended for it to be that way. Suggesting it's a "bug" is silly. Suggesting they "fixed the bug" is misleading.
    - senko 16y ago
      Except if in fact it's an artifact of their SMS interface, which somehow got exposed, or was forgotten and not removed when needed. In which case I'd consider it a bug, not an bad but intentional decision.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jasonlbaptiste 16y ago

better question: does it produce a full follow ie- if i did this bug, would billgates actually see me in his stream? OR does it just increase the follower count+i show up on his sidebar. if its the former, then wow. I know they're clearing it out now, but somebody must have been using this for a while.

fname 16y ago
Yes.
mortenjorck 16y ago
I tried it between my main account and a disused one and tweets from the attacking account showed up both through the web interface and through the API.

obsaysditto 16y ago

Its coincidental that Conan tweeted this message a couple days ago: "If it ever says I’m following more than one person, I’ve been hacked. I’m a completely monogamous Twitterer—I only follow Sarah Killen." http://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/status/13631062967 http://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/status/13631062967

zach 16y ago
Wow, Conan's Twitter account is not only a test, he's got a user story (that just turned red): In order to provoke curiosity and amusement As a celebrity comedy writer and television host I want to only be shown as following one otherwise-unknown person in Michigan
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
symesc 16y ago
In the past couple minutes I watched Conan's page while his "following" list went from about 11 to 2 and then back to just Sarah. Page refreshes were very slow. The elves are busy.

whakojacko 16y ago

Even without this bug, I dont think they should still allow commands via tweet at all. It made sense when most tweets were via SMS, but not anymore...Maybe for emerging markets with heavy SMS usage, add a 2nd number to send commands to isolate the two?

julio_the_squid 16y ago
Follow and Block make sense as commands you can send through a message. But Accept? Why would you ever be able to control an action on someone else's account? It's rather odd that this exists at all.
- duskwuff 16y ago
  If you've got your tweets protected (private), you have to accept users to allow them to follow you.
  - julio_the_squid 16y ago
    I think you've missed the point here. This isn't a command that tells your account to accept follow request, or adds someone to your following list - this is a command that instantly makes other people 'accept' a follow request from YOU. This works completely differently in how it would consider the username parameter, and in that the change is applied to the other person's account, not yours.

thedjpetersen 16y ago

Jason Calacanis dream come true :P

yigit 16y ago

here is the official twitter status blog: http://status.twitter.com/ http://status.twitter.com/

shrikant 16y ago

Link doesn't work - does a server hammering lead to a 404? I didn't know it could...

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

BBC has a report on this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10106166.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10106166.stm

djb_hackernews 16y ago

watch everyone play! http://search.twitter.com/search?q=accept http://search.twitter.com/search?q=accept

bena 16y ago

I don't think they've actually wiped out your followers and people you follow. I think they just prevented us from accessing those tables because I'm still getting tweets from people I follow, I just can't see the lists.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

Allegedly fixed, twitter is working on rolling back abuses of the hack. http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discovered-remedied http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discover...

tlrobinson 16y ago
Fortunately for Twitter it's incredible easy to track (/^accept \w+$/)
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  Not quite. accept <username> is a perfectly valid command, but it is designed to allow someone requesting to follow you to follow you. Twitter needed to find accept requests which did not have matching follow requests, which is a bit more effort (but not much, I'd imagine). As of now the problem appears to be fixed for a lot of people already.

goldham 16y ago

I would not want to be in the Twitter offices today. Good day to call in sick.

techsansar 16y ago

doesnot work..its already fixed~

blizkreeg 16y ago

Oooo approaching 2012 ;) Louisiana oil spill. Massive Twitter bug. Sticky finger Dow collapse. Facebook losing it's privacy mojo. And to top it off, one line of code I checked in late last night prevented 200 new users from signing up on my freshly minted site.

olh 16y ago

Seems that the fix is just a filter. Is anyone else trying to bypass with html ascii? A few minutes ago, a prompt with the html ascii returned a +0x36 on every char. Now it does not give feedback. "accept BillGates": &#61 ;&#63 ;&#63 ;&#65 ;&#70 ;&#74 ;&#20 ;&#42 ;&#69 ;&#6C ;&#6C ;&#47 ;&#61 ;&#74 ;&#65 ;&#73 ; Maybe they already really fixed this bug (I hope).

gokhan 16y ago

The Turkish user who found the bug explains it here (in Turkish): http://inci.sozlukspot.com/e/4266098/ http://inci.sozlukspot.com/e/4266098/ And people wondering why Axl Rose is following him here :) http://www.mygnrforum.com/index.php?showtopic=164026&st=0 http://www.mygnrforum.com/index.php?showtopic=164026&st=...

tszming 16y ago

Update (6:30 PM PST): We’ve finished our cleanup of the spurious followings generated a result of this bug. 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. Obviously, their so called "cleanup" is incomplete, at least for me :)

araneae 16y ago

Exploit is fixed, and follower lists are rolled back, but they didn't do a perfect job... Felicia Day is still following me. ^-^